Determinations of aircraft position and orientation from images of a millimetric surface radar

The present work mainly deals with the determination of geometrical and kinematics parameters by the processing of images gathered from a high-resolution radar sensor. The aim of this application is to determine the orientation and the position of aircraft in an Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control (A-SMGCS) environment. The radar sensor is a prototype operating in the millimetre band (95 GHz) and conceived for the surveillance function. By using suitable image processing the aircraft position is computed with different methods including moments and cross-correlation with a model variable as a function of the angle between the aircraft axis and radar ray direction. The more accurate calculations (e.g., cross-correlation) are made only around a rough estimated position, and therefore the calculation time is drastically reduced.