volume | PIER Journals

2014-02-11

Micro-Air-Vehicle-Borne Near-Range SAR with Motion Compensation

Huaming Wu,

Dr. Huaming Wu

Institut fuer Hochfrequenztechnik und Elektronik, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Germany

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Thomas Zwick

Dr. Thomas Zwick

Institute of Radio Frequency Engineering and Electronics (IHE)

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Germany

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Progress In Electromagnetics Research, Vol. 145, 11-18, 2014

doi:10.2528/PIER13122002

Abstract

The major difficulty of realizing a micro-air-vehicle-borne (MAV-borne) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is the motion errors that need to be precisely measured and compensated. This paper presents two novel motion measuring algorithms specifically for near-range applications. These algorithms use only low-cost micro-electronicmechanical system (MEMS) inertial measurement units (IMU). A MAV-borne SAR system was built equipped with a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) motion sensing board. Several MAV-borne SAR measurements were performed for the first time in a hall with a realistic scene. SAR images were generated with proposed motion measuring algorithms in off-line mode. Obvious improvements in SAR image quality in terms of focusing have been observed after motion compensation with the proposed motion measuring algorithms. These results show that MAV-borne SAR together with low-cost IMU can yield very useful images.

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Huaming Wu, and Thomas Zwick, "Micro-Air-Vehicle-Borne Near-Range SAR with Motion Compensation," Progress In Electromagnetics Research, Vol. 145, 11-18, 2014.
doi:10.2528/PIER13122002

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