Characterization of building structures with SAR

The characterization of building structures plays a role in many fields of application in electrical engineering. For ex-ample, radar engineers who are concerned with through-wall imaging are very interested in the geometric and electro-magnetic properties of a building wall. Distortion in the propagation of the wave through the wall structure leads to pos-sible errors in the location of targets behind the wall. These emerging errors can be compensated in the sensor data once the structure of the wall is known. Furthermore, building managers who are commissioned with the renovation of a res-idential unit can realize adequate insulation systems with the complete information on installed materials, stone types and number of layers. The DLR – Microwaves and Radar Institute – now examines the possibility of using the princi-ples of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to provide high resolution images of wall structures. This paper outlines the first investigations on the problem and measurement results