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Since several years the use of active (radar) and passive (radiometer) MMW remote sensing is considered as an appropriate tool for a lot of security related applications. Those are personnel screening for concealed object detection under clothing, or enhanced vision for vehicles or aircraft, just to mention few examples. Radars, having a transmitter for scene illumination and a receiver for echo recording, are basically range measuring devices which deliver in addition information about a target’s reflectivity behavior. Radiometers, having only a receiver to record natural thermal radiation power, provide typically emission and reflection properties of a scene using the environment and the cosmic background radiation as a natural illumination source. Consequently, the active and passive signature of a scene and its objects is quite different depending on the target and its scattering characteristics, and the actual illumination properties. Typically technology providers are working either purely on radar or purely on radiometers for gathering information about a scene of interest. Rather rarely both information sources are really combined for enhanced information extraction, and then the sensor’s imaging geometries usually do not fit adequately so that the benefit of doing that cannot be fully exploited. Consequently, investigations on adequate combinations of MMW radar and radiometer data have been performed. A mechanical scanner used from earlier experiments on personnel screening was modified to provide similar imaging geometry for Ka-band radiometer and K-band radar. First experimental results are shown and discussed.
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