Terahertz Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar for 1-D Near-Field High-Resolution Imaging

Considering the difficult transceiver-isolation problem of the monostatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in the terahertz (THz) band, this paper proposes a compact THz bistatic SAR (BiSAR) geometry. The system allows the separately distributed transmitter and receivers. At the receiving end, there are a direct-wave receiver and an echo receiver, both operating at the heterodyne and in-phase mode. The echo receiver runs along a linear rail to fulfill the scene scanning, while the direct-wave one is fixed as a reference. Furthermore, assuming that the receivers are synchronized, both the problem of synchronization between the separated transmitter and receivers and the problem of timing at the signal acquisition would be solved by utilizing the high coherence between the echo and the direct wave. Based on such a system, the application of THz BiSAR for one-dimensional imaging is taken into consideration. Then, a high-resolution imaging algorithm is proposed benefitting from the total least squares estimating signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (TLS-ESPRIT) and the spatial smoothing process (SSP). The imaging performance is then demonstrated by both simulations and the experiments in the 0.183 THz.