Floor plan radar

Urban-warfare specialists, law-enforcement officers, counter-drug agents, and counter-terrorism experts encounter operational situations where they must assault a target building and capture or rescue its occupants. To minimize potential casualties, the assault team needs a picture of the building's interior and a copy of its floor plan. With this need in mind, we constructed a scale model of a single-story house and imaged its interior using synthetic-aperture techniques. The interior and exterior wails nearest the radar set were imaged with good fidelity, but the distal ones appear poorly defined and surrounded by ghosts and artifacts. The latter defects are traceable to beam attenuation, wavefront distortion, multiple scattering traveling waves, resonance phenomena, and other effects not accounted for in the traditional (noninteracting, isotropic point scatterer) model for radar imaging.