| Abstract: | We consider the problem of noninvasively locating objects buried in a layered medium such as land mines in the ground or objects concealed in a wall. In such environments, the transmitter(s) and receiver(s) are frequently within the near‐field region of the illuminating radiation. In these cases, the scattered evanescent field carries useful information on the scattering object. Conventional diffraction tomography techniques neglect, by their design, the evanescent field. Under near‐field conditions, they treat it as noise as opposed to valid data. If correctly incorporated into a reconstruction algorithm, the evanescent field, which carries high spatial frequency information, can be used to achieve resolution beyond the classical limit of λ/2, or “superresolution.” We build on the generalized holography theory presented by Langenberg to develop a planar diffraction tomography algorithm that incorporates evanescent field information to achieve superresolution. Our theory is based on a generalization of the Fourier transform, which allows for complex spatial frequencies in a manner similar to the Laplace transform. We specialize our model to the case of a two‐dimensional multimonostatic, wideband imaging system, and derive an extended resolution reconstruction procedure. We implement and apply our reconstruction to two data sets collected using the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Micropower Impulse Radar (MIR). © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol 12, 16–26, 2002 |
