Plenary Speaker: Mojtaba Fallahpour (Tuesday)

Speaker Bio

Mojtaba Fallahpour received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), in 2005 and 2008, respectively. Then, he joined the Applied Microwave Nondestructive Testing Lab at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), where he worked on his Ph.D. thesis, “Synthetic Aperture Radar-Based Techniques and Reconfigurable Antenna Design for Microwave Imaging of Layered Structures,” from 2009 to 2013.

In summer 2012, he interned at Signal Integrity (SI) Group at Micron Technology Inc., and later, in Fall 2012, he interned at Hardware\Signal Integrity Group at Cisco Systems Inc.

After graduation, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), as a Postdoctoral Research Associate (2013-2015) and worked on multi-scale scattering problems. In January 2016, he started at the Center of Integrated Systems at Stanford University and worked on short range millimeter wave radar-based imaging and microwave induced thermoacoustic imaging. In August 2017, he joined ANSYS Inc.

Dr Fallahpour is a member of IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, Antennas and Propagation Society, Nanotechnology Council, Sensors Council, Council on Electronic Design Automation, and Eta Kappa Nu. He has provided several volunteer services to IEEE societies including Instrumentation and Measurement, Antennas and Propagation, Geoscience and Remote Sensing societies.

Dr. Fallahpour has over 30 technical publications consisting of journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapter, and technical reports. He was awarded as first ranked student (based on GPA) at IUST (2008). He is the recipient of 2009 ASNT Graduate Fellowship Award and the best poster award in International Year of Light Symposium (UIUC, 2015). In 2013, Dr. Fallahpour was recognized as “Outstanding Reviewer” by IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurements. In 2015, he was named to the UIUC’s List of Teachers Ranked Excellent by Students.

Green’s Function-Based 3D Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging of Layered Media

Most of the current imaging and sensing applications require a system which images embedded targets inside an inhomogeneous media. For example, for indoor imaging and sensing applications, transceivers may need to image objects behind the walls. A combination of air-wall-air creates an inhomogeneous layered background media and unwanted reflections can occur at the interfaces and mask the actual targets. Despite many advantages offered by synthetic aperture radar (SAR) over other imaging methods, it had been initially developed for free-space imaging and could not be used for seeing through inhomogeneous media. To address this issue, a Green’s function-based 3D SAR algorithm is introduced which uses Wiener filter deconvolution and can properly image embedded targets inside layered media. In order to verify the performance of the proposed technique, several simulation and measurement setups were developed and used. The produced images will be presented for nondestructive testing (NDT), through-the-wall imaging, and structural health monitoring applications.