Technology and Applications of UAV Synthetic Aperture Radar System

This paper provides a brief review of the development in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) borne SAR technology, and gives a summary on the important areas of UAV SAR, including the operation mode, key facilitating technology, performance and specifications, typical systems and applications. According to the characteristics and attributes of UAV platform, the paper focuses on the current development of high resolution, motion compensation and innovative operation mode of the UAV SAR payload. On the demonstration of high resolution, full polarization and interferometric UAV SAR systems, the technologies of top level design on modular reconfiguration, real-time image formation and multi-dimentional motion compensation involved are introduced in detail. Also, the future development trends of UAV SAR technology is discussed as well.

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