The use of small drone platform has become a popular topic in these days but its application for SAR operation has been little known due to the burden of the payload implementation. Drone platforms are distinguished from the conventional UAV system by the increased vulnerability to the turbulences, control-errors and poor motion stability. Consequently, sophisticated motion compensation may be required to guarantee the successful acquisition of high quality SAR imagery. Extremely limited power and mass budgets may prevent the use of additional hardwares for motion compensation and the difficulty of SAR focusing is further aggravated. In this paper, we have carried out a feasibility study of mico-SAR drone operation. We present the image acquisition results from the preliminary flight tests and a quality assessment is followed on the experimental SAR images. The in-flight motion errors derived from the unique drone movements are investigated and attempts have been made to compensate for the geometrical and phase errors caused by motions against the nominal trajectory. Finally, the successful operation of drone SAR system is validated through the focussed SAR images taken over test sites.
Along with the popular use of commercial drones, there are increased concerns on the possible threats from drones intruding into secured areas. The difficulty of drone detection is attributed to its stealthy operation flying at low altitude with low level signature. Consequently, the anti-drone technique has been of major research topic in recent years and among others, the radar detection is considered as the most promising technique. However, the use of conventional radar detection may not be effective due to the low level radar cross sections of the commercial drones. In this paper, ISAR technique has been employed to implement drone detection in urban area. To this purpose, a pulsed radar system is set up on the ground to track flying drones and the corresponding ISAR images are produced by coherent processing.
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