Time-of-Flight Microwave Camera: Seeing Through Walls and Recording Microwaves in Flight

The architecture takes a hybrid approach to microwaves and treats them like waves of light. Most other work places antennas in a 2D arrangement to directly sample the RF reflections that return. Instead of placing antennas in a 2D arrangment, we use a single, passive, parabolic reflector (dish) as a lens. You can think of every point on that dish as an antenna with a fixed phase-offset. This means that the lens acts as a fixed set of 2D antennas which are very dense and spaced across a large aperture. We then sample the focal-plane of that lens. This architecture makes it possible for us to capture higher resolution images at a lower cost.