A new passive coding imaging method in synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer

—Synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer (SAIR) is a high-resolution passive imager by sparsely arranging a number of small aperture antennas to synthesize a large aperture. However, the SAIR requires as many receivers as antennas needed, which results in high system complexity and hardware cost and limits the application of the SAIR. Aiming to reduce the system complexity of SAIR, a new passive coding imaging method is proposed in this paper. By using a new aperture coded measurement approach, the proposed method can significantly reduce the number of RF chains while keeping the image fidelity. The effectiveness of the proposed imaging method has been verified by simulations. The results reveal that the proposed method can be an efficient alternative for simplifying the architectures of SAIR. © 2020, Electromagnetics Academy. All rights reserved.