Missile-borne Near-field Radar Coincidence Imaging Using a Uniform Circular Array

In the missile-borne radar imaging application, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is limited in forward-looking mode due to imaging geometry. A missile-borne near-field radar coincidence imaging (NFRCI) method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, using a uniform circular array (UCA) as the transmitting antenna, every array element of the UCA transmits the random phase modulation signals. Then, the general relationship between the resolution of NFRCI and the independent characteristic is analyzed by deriving the autocorrelations in the time and space dimension. Finally, the NFRCI is obtained based on the parametric representation model and the sparse Bayesian learning algorithm. The proposed analysis and imaging method are validated through numerical simulations.