Vibration-parameters Estimation Method for Airplane Wings Based on Microwave-photonics Ultrahigh-resolution Radar

Abstract

The wings of an airplane vibrate when it is nonstationary. When an airplane is observed using a microwave photonics-based ultrahigh-resolution radar, and this vibration will cause defocusing of the wings. To address this problem, we propose a vibration-parameter estimation method for airplane wings based on microwave-photonics ultrahigh-resolution radar. In this method, we first coarsely separate images of the wings and body of the airplane, and estimate the Light-Of-Sight (LOS) of the radar from a focused and scaled image of the airplane body. Next, we apply sub-aperture imaging to the wings and extract the range and Doppler curves from a sequence of sub-aperture images. By combining the range and Doppler curves with the LOS, we can obtain a preliminary estimation of the vibration parameters. Finally, by Modifying the Polar Format Algorithm (MPFA) and constructing an optimization function that minimizes image entropy, we can obtain accurate vibration parameters. This novel modified polar format algorithm can be applied to complex motion targets, such as an airplane with vibrating wings, swinging ships to effectively decouple range and cross-range dimensional coupling. Experimental results using both simulated and measured data confirm the validity and practicality of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords

• Vibration
• Sub-aperture
• Modified Polar Format Algorithm (MPFA)
• Entropy minimization
• Optimization