Synthetic Beam Scanning and Super-Resolution Coincidence Imaging Based on Randomly Excited Antenna Array

Nowadays, there is no good scheme for simultaneously achieving super-resolution imaging within a coherent beamwidth and beam scanning in microwave radars. In this article, a synthetic beam scanning method based on a randomly excited antenna array, which possesses the ability of super-resolution coincidence imaging, is proposed. The beamwidth of the randomly excited array is comparable to that of the conventional phased array with the same size, and its steering angle can be adjusted by modulating the excitation signals. First, the optimized covariance matrix of the proposed array to uniformly bunch the spatial radiation energy in a specific angle range is obtained by means of the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm. Accordingly, the partially correlated excitation signals restricted by the optimized covariance matrix are determined. Then, a secondary weighted modulation method is proposed to steer the main beam to the direction of interest. The excitation signals are weighted by the conjugated radiation fields in the direction of interest. Furthermore, the super-resolution ability of the proposed coincidence imaging system is analyzed based on the first-order statistical characteristics of the radiation fields. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that synthetic beam scanning can be realized by controlling the excitation signals. Besides, a ten times super-resolution coincidence image can be reconstructed within a coherent beamwidth (3-dB beamwidth) when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is greater than 15 dB, assisted by the fast Bayesian learning (FBL) algorithm.