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US 2014/0111374 A1Published application
Free-hand scanning and imaging
AssigneeThe Curators of the University of Missouri
InventorsJoseph T. Case, Mohammad Tayeb Ghasr, Reza Zoughi
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Wideband synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. A probe transmits a signal through its aperture incident to an object located in a medium of interest remotely from the probe. The probe receives through the aperture a plurality of nonuniformly sampled reflected signals from the object as the probe moves in a measurement plane located a predetermined distance from the object. A processor executes a SAR-based reconstruction algorithm to generate an image.
Claims30
A wideband synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging system, comprising:
- a probe having an aperture through which a signal is transmitted incident to an object located in a medium of interest remotely from the probe and through which a plurality of nonuniformly sampled reflected signals from the object are received by the probe as the probe moves in a measurement plane located a predetermined distance from the object;
- a memory for storing measurement data representative of the reflected signals collected by the probe;
- a processor executing a plurality of computer-executable instructions for a SAR-based reconstruction algorithm, said instructions comprising:
- instructions for performing a spectral estimation based on the measurement data;
- instructions for transforming a frequency component of the spectral estimation as a function of the medium of interest;
- instructions for obtaining a three-dimensional SAR image from the transformed spectral estimation data using Fourier transforms;
- and
- a display responsive to the processor for presenting the three-dimensional SAR image to a user.
5 more elements
A method of generating a three dimensional image of a specimen under test (SUT) comprising:
- transmitting, via the probe, a signal within a predetermined operating bandwidth;
- tracking nonuniform two-dimensional movement of a probe within a measurement plane remote from the SUT;
- receiving, via the probe, signals reflected from the SUT during the movement of the probe;
- storing reflection coefficient data based on the reflected signals as distributed measurement positions within the measurement plane by recording the signals at discrete frequencies throughout the operating bandwidth;
- processing the stored data into a wide band, synthetic aperture image by implementing a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) algorithm;
- displaying the image to a user in real-time;
- further processing the image to perform an optimization objective;
- and
- further displaying the optimized image to the user.
6 more elements
A wideband synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging system, comprising:
- a signal source for generating a signal with a predetermined operating bandwidth;
- a transceiver antenna coupled to the signal source, the antenna having an aperture through which the signal is transmitted incident to an object located in a medium and through which a plurality of nonuniformly sampled reflected signals from the object are received by the antenna as the antenna moves nonuniformly in a plane located a predetermined distance from the object;
- a memory for storing signal data, the signal data comprising nonuniformly sampled reflected signals collected at the aperture;
- a processor executing a plurality of computer-executable instructions for a real-time, post-processing, reconstruction algorithm comprising:
- instructions for estimating a two-dimensional spatial spectrum based on the signal data to provide a uniformly sampled spectrum;
- instructions for estimating the uniformly sampled spectrum to remove or minimize image artifacts;
- instructions for reconstructing uniformly sampled data from nonuniformly sampled data to remove or minimize image artifacts;
- instructions for forming a SAR image of the object from the estimated uniform spectrum;
- instructions for dividing the reconstructed SAR image into a plurality of segments;
- instructions for applying a R-SAR transform to each of the segments;
- instructions for filtering and reconstructing the data for each segment and summing each filtered segment;
- a display for presenting the three-dimensional SAR image in real-time to a user.
9 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.