Improving millimeter-wave imaging quality using the vortex phase method

This paper investigates a new vortex wave imaging approach to improve the imaging quality of small metal targets of size less than 1.5 mm. Antennas with different spiral phase plates are designed to efficiently transmit vortex beams with orbital angular momentums (OAMs). By analyzing the OAM spectrum of the target, it was discovered that the predominant reflection contains a particular OAM mode that carries abundant azimuthal information. This can be explained by the OAM selectivity of the target and the guidance of the vortex transmitting beam. A simple reflection vortex imaging system was designed to capture the phase information. Measurement results show that the high image contrast reaches 14.9%, which is twice as high as that of the imaging without OAM. Both of simulations and experiments demonstrate that the vortex phase imaging approach proposed in this paper can effectively improve the imaging quality at 80 GHz. This approach is suitable for other millimeter wave imaging systems and is helpful to improve the resolution in anti-terrorism security checks.