Angle-and-time-domain Gating Technique for Time-reversal MUSIC Imaging
Heedong Choi, Yasutaka Ogawa, Toshihiko Nishimura, Takeo Ohgane
IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society, AP-S International Symposium (Digest) 86 - 89 1522-3965 2012
Time-reversal multiple signal classification (TR-MUSIC) [1] has been a topic of recent interest in a variety of disciplines, including acoustics, communication and industrial applications [2]. Among the developed TR-MUSIC methodology, the TR-MUSIC imaging with the time-domain gating technique not only provides noise reduction by filtering in the time domain, but also relaxes the transceiver restriction by reducing the number of targets (scatterers) to be detected at one time [3]. Because the developed TR-MUSIC algorithm based on the time-domain gating technique extracts target response(s) in the time domain, it has a one-dimensional (time-domain) filtering effect in the scattering scenario. Unfortunately, this image is subject to focusing errors which are caused by many targets in the gated region. It also requires non-trivial conditions, that is, target response(s) or sidelobes (skirts) of the responses must be separated with one another to extract desired response(s) [3]. However, it may be difficult for this condition to be satisfied because targets are irregularly and/or randomly spread out over the scattering scenario. In this study, we propose a two-dimensional (angle-and-time-domain) gating technique accompanied with the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and spatial FFT processing. The concept of the spatial FFT has been proposed and considered as a beamforming technique [4]. By utilizing the weight adaptation, the beamforming technique can estimate coarse directions of arrival. Therefore, if we suppress unwanted signal(s) in the angle domain, we can overcome the above obstacle in the same scattering configuration. That is, since the proposed gating technique extracts targets in the two-dimensional region, we can expect the improvement of imaging function. © 2012 IEICE.