Aperture-synthesis techniques that use very low power illumination

Active imaging techniques are described that have minimum transmitter aperture redundancy and maximum transmitter intermittency. The proposed techniques are variants of Fourier telescopy. These techniques largely overcome conventional signal limitations by encoding the image information in the time domain. The basic approach combines long-baseline interferometry with phase closure to obtain high resolution images with very low average transmitter power, by proper choice of phase closure strategy. Several strategies are discussed and simulation results are presented.