Handheld Millimeter Wave Imaging System based on a Two-Dimensional Multistatic Sparse Array

An active handheld millimeter wave imaging device for non-destructive testing has been developed. The system operates from 70 to 80 GHz and provides real-time imaging capabilities with depth information. The imaging concept is based on the effective aperture approach in combination with a sparse two-dimensional array of transmit and receive antennas. The system is designed to contain the antenna array, a signal-multiplexing-unit, FPGA-data-acquisition and signal synthesizers as well as a display for visualization in a single handheld enclosure. A USB 3.0 connection is used for data transfer to a mobile computer unit with consumer graphics card for parallel processing of the image reconstruction.