MARS: a mmWave Rotating Synthetic Aperture Radar System for Indoor Imaging

In this paper, we develop, MARS, a Millimeter wAve (mmWave) Rotating Synthetic aperture radar (ROSAR) platform that can scan a 360° view of the environment. The platform consists of a radar attached to the edge of a rotating plate. As the plate spins, the radar transmits signals that reflect off the targets in the surroundings. By applying the Back-Projection Algorithm (BPA) on the collected data, we can reconstruct high-resolution images of the target area. However, BPA is computationally intensive. To speed up the imaging process, we propose two methods: range-FFT and GPU acceleration. Experiments show that MARS can successfully generate images of the indoor environments, and that GPU acceleration can reduce the time cost up to 98% compared to the conventional BPA.