Passive millimeter-wave imaging with compressive sensing

Abstract. Passive millimeter-wave (PMMW) imagers using a single radiometer, called single pixel imagers, employ raster scanning to produce images. A serious drawback of such a single pixel imaging system is the long acquisition time needed to produce a high-fidelity image, arising from two factors: (a) the time to scan the whole scene pixel by pixel and (b) the integration time for each pixel to achieve adequate signal to noise ratio. Recently, compressive sensing (CS) has been developed for single-pixel optical cameras to significantly reduce the imaging time and at the same time produce high-fidelity images by exploiting the sparsity of the data in some transform domain. While the efficacy of CS has been established for single-pixel optical systems, its application to PMMW imaging is not straightforward due to its (a) longer wavelength by three to four orders of magnitude that suffers high diffraction losses at finite size spatial waveform modulators and (b) weaker radiation intensity, for example, by eight orders of magnitude less than that of infrared. We present the development and implementation of a CS technique for PMMW imagers and shows a factor-of-ten increase in imaging speed.