Precise Motion Compensation Approach for High-Resolution Multirotor UAV SAR in the Presence of Multiple Errors

Abstract

As an important supplement to traditional airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) SAR has the advantages of low cost, high flexibility, and strong survival ability. However, due to the complex motion and flight characteristics of the multirotor UAV platform, multirotor UAV SAR faces challenges, including spatially variant low-frequency (LF) errors and severe high-frequency (HF) errors. To deal with these problems, an improved motion compensation approach is proposed for multirotor UAV SAR imaging, which is implemented through two processing steps. 1) The LF errors are eliminated by an improved two-step MoCo approach, which takes into account the spatial variations of both envelope and phase. 2) The HF errors are estimated and corrected by an extended phase gradient autofocus scheme. Different from conventional solutions, our approach can effectively remove the complex motion errors of multirotor UAV SAR step-by-step with high robustness even in high-resolution scenarios. Computer simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Keywords

• High-frequency (HF) error
• low-frequency (LF) error
• motion compensation (MOCO)
• multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)