Analysis and Experimental Validation of Key Technologies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-borne Bistatic Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

Bistatic interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) overcomes the baseline length limit of the configuration of single-station interferometric SAR with two antennas and has become the primary method of terrain mapping using spaceborne interferometric SAR. To reduce the cost of surveying and mapping while promoting the development and application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-borne bistatic interferometric SAR, the Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences took the lead in designing and developing a UAV-borne bistatic interferometric SAR processing system and performed flight experiments at Bailing Airport in Inner Mongolia. Herein, the system design, composition, and performance are introduced, and the scheme and implementation of the first flight experiment, along with the preliminary data processing results, are presented. In addition, the key performance metrics of the system, such as 0.5 m-elevation measurement accuracy, are verified in this study. The system serves as a foundation for future research topics, such as distributed InSAR using a multiaviation platform and tomography data acquisition and processing.

Keywords

• interferometric synthetic aperture radar (insar)
• bistatic sar
• uav-borne insar
• spatial synchronization
• time synchronization
• phase synchronization