Compressive sampling for time critical microwave imaging applications

Across all biomedical imaging applications, there is a growing emphasis placed on reducing data acquisition and imaging times. This research explores the use of a technique, known as compressive sampling or compressed sensing (CS), as an efficient technique to minimise the data acquisition time for time critical microwave imaging (MWI) applications. Where a signal exhibits sparsity in the time domain, the proposed CS implementation allows for sub-sampling acquisition in the frequency domain and consequently shorter imaging times, albeit at the expense of a slight degradation in reconstruction quality of the signals as the compression increases. This Letter focuses on ultra wideband (UWB) radar MWI applications where reducing acquisition is of critical importance therefore a slight degradation in reconstruction quality may be acceptable. The analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and suitability of CS with UWB applications.