A Drone Fleet-Borne SAR Model and Three-Dimensional Imaging Algorithm

Due to the advantages of low cost and flexible flight, small drones are showing tremendous application prospect in plenty of fields. Aiming at public area monitoring, a drone fleet-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) model is built in this paper. In this model, each radar is mounted on a small drone while illuminating the area of interest and the drones fly forward straightly in an array form. For practical feasibility, it is assumed that each radar works independently and simultaneously. To avoid interference, frequency-divided (FD) signals are adopted. Besides, bandwidth synthesizing is performed to improve the range resolution. Furthermore, 3D imaging is realized via combining the traditional 2D SAR imaging technique and the sensor array signal processing method. In specification, beamforming (BF) is adopted for the array direction compression. With flexible data acquisition model and fast imaging algorithm, 3D imaging using drone fleet borne SAR has great potential in real-time monitoring. The simulation experiments of point targets are performed and the imaging results validate the effectiveness of the proposed imaging model and 3D image formation algorithm.

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