In the first part of this thesis millimetre-wave interferometric imagers are considered
for short-range applications such as concealed weapons detection. Compared to real
aperture systems, synthetic aperture imagers at these wavelengths can provide improvements
in terms of size, cost, depth-of-field (DoF) and imaging flexibility via digitalrefocusing.
Mechanical scanning between the scene and the array is investigated to
reduce the number of antennas and correlators which drive the cost of such imagers.
The tradeoffs associated with this hardware reduction are assessed before to jointly
optimise the array configuration and scanning motion. To that end, a novel metric is
proposed to quantify the uniformity of the Fourier domain coverage of the array and is
maximised with a genetic algorithm. The resulting array demonstrates clear improvements
in imaging performances compared to a conventional power-law Y-shaped array.
The DoF of antenna arrays, analysed via the Strehl ratio, is shown to be limited even
for infinitely small antennas, with the exception of circular arrays.
In the second part of this thesis increased DoF in optical systems with Wavefront
Coding (WC) is studied. Images obtained with WC are shown to exhibit artifacts
that limit the benefits of this technique. An image restoration procedure employing a
metric of defocus is proposed to remove these artifacts and therefore extend the DoF
beyond the limit of conventional WC systems. A transmission optical microscope was
designed and implemented to operate with WC. After suppression of partial coherence
effects, the proposed image restoration method was successfully applied and extended
DoF images are presented
