A Low-Cost and Compact Three-Dimensional Microwave Holographic Imaging System

Abstract

With the significant growth in the use of non-metallic composite materials, the demands for new and robust non-destructive testing methodologies is high. Microwave imaging has attracted a lot of attention recently for such applications. This is in addition to the biomedical imaging applications of microwave that are also being pursued actively. Among these efforts, in this paper, we propose a compact and cost-effective three-dimensional microwave imaging system based on a fast and robust holographic technique. For this purpose, we employ narrow-band microwave data, instead of wideband data used in previous three-dimensional cylindrical holographic imaging systems. Three-dimensional imaging is accomplished by using an array of receiver antennas surrounding the object and scanning that along with a transmitter antenna over a cylindrical aperture. To achieve low cost and compact size, we employ off-the-shelf components to build a data acquisition system replacing the costly and bulky vector network analyzers. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the proposed imaging system. We also show the effect of number of frequencies and size of the objects on the quality of reconstructed images.