Publication Details
Overview
 
 
Saiful Islam, Irina Jager, Gaetan Koers, Roger Vounckx
 

Chapter in Book/ Report/ Conference proceeding

Abstract 

Millimeter waves are able to penetrate materials that are usually opaque to both visible and infrared radiation. We used this advantage to design a free-space active millimeter-wave imaging set up for security applications. Because all existing mm-wave sources are coherent - speckle is one of the ultimate limiting factors of the imaging techniques. This problem is of special importance for mm-wave imaging, because surface roughness is closer to the object dimension as in optical imaging. The reduction of speckle is highly desirable and we propose here a Hadamard matrix solution, which is one of the most efficient ways to reduce speckle noise. By illuminating the object with a series of orthogonal phase patterns corresponding to permutations of Hadamard matrices, one can convert the sum of electrical fields (coherent) in the image pixel into a sum of intensities (non-coherent). We report a 50% speckle reduction. The effect of speckle reduction was measured using both a vector network analyzer and a W-band free-space scalar calibrated measurement setup. We processed 2 different Hadamard diffusers and present here measurement data discussing speckle contrast as a function of frequency.

Reference