Experimental Microwave Imaging With a Novel Corrugated Vivaldi Antenna

In this communication, a novel corrugated Vivaldi antenna (CVA) is developed for microwave imaging (MWI) applications. In particular, different from the previous works, the lengths of the corrugations are independently optimized to reach the final design. It is shown that by letting more parameters to be optimized in the design process, we can obtain a more effective CVA, which has more suitable characteristics for MWI applications (i.e., higher gain, broader bandwidth) compared with the previous designs. Apart from that, the imaging performance of the proposed design is compared with a generic VA having the same size of the proposed antenna. As imaging algorithm, a recently introduced qualitative MWI technique, the scattering parameter-based linear sampling method (S-LSM), is employed. The similarity between exact shapes of the targets and the obtained qualitative results are compared with the help of the well-known Jaccard index. Experimental results show that the proposed CVA performs better than a generic VA in such real-world MWI problems.