Dr. Mojtaba Dehmollaian, Prof. Kamal Sarabandi

Prof. Kamal Sarabandi and research fellow Dr. Mojtaba Dehmollaian received the Symposium Prize Paper Award at the 2008 IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) for their paper, "Refocusing Through Single Layer Building Wall Using Synthetic Aperture Radar." Their prizewinning paper was one of about 2000 papers originally presented at IGARSS 2007.

The paper describes a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging technique that was developed for "seeing" through walls using ultra-wideband signal at UHF band and wide viewing angle to get high resolution images. Complexities for such proposed systems are distortions caused by the wall and possible multipath. In this paper a novel algorithm for refocusing through building walls was developed and demonstrated experimentally. The wall parameters are estimated from the backscatter signal and used in a proper fashion in the SAR matched filter. Also, the higher frequency portion of the spectrum is reused to achieve finer cross-range compression which together with the original image was shown to produce very high quality radar images of building interiors. Such imaging radar systems can be used by fire fighters, earthquake rescue teams, and law enforcement to detect and track people inside buildings.