UAV Detection with the Variance of Higher-Order Cumulants

Due to the popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), UAV detection technology has attracted considerable attention. In order to widely deploy UAV detection for preventing civil UAVs, a UAV detection method that can be used with any transceiver and operate in parallel with any communication system is proposed in this paper. UAV flights influence electromagnetic environments during signal propagation, and the proposed method detects UAVs based on the variance of higher-order cumulants. In this paper, the principle of the method is deduced and proven, and the detection performance is analysed. Explicit expressions for the detection and false alarm probabilities are obtained, and the influencing factors are investigated. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is verified experimentally, and the detection distance, signal-to-noise ratio and detection height are analysed. The results give the effective detection distance and show that the proposed method has superior anti-noise performance.