With the benefits of digital IC technology development, the synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer (SAIR) technique is growing fast and expanding to more and more application areas. The near field imaging detection is a potential application which has received increasing demand recently. Because the Fourier imaging theory of the traditional SAIR is based on far-field approximation, it will be invalid for near-field condition. This paper is devoted to establishing a new accurate imaging algorithm for near-field SAIR imaging. Firstly, the visibility function in near field is deduced and the relationship of which to far-field visibility function is analyzed. Then, a numerical method based on pseudo inverse and focal plane approximation is developed. The effectivity of this method is tested with imaging simulation of point source and extended source, and the superiority is also demonstrated by comparing with the existing phase-modified Fourier transform method. At last, the field experiment with one-dimensional SAIR instrument is performed to validate the practical feasibility of this method.
