Study on the Pivotal Imaging Technology of Mini SAR on UAV

The application of miniature unmanned aerial platforms has been growing in popularity whether in military reconnaissance or in civilian monitoring systems over the past few years. Installation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) on board of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a high-efficient but low-cost remote sensing technology. However, UAV is sensitive to atmospheric turbulences and it may not carry high-accuracy inertial navigation systems (INS) and global positioning system (GPS). These make Mini SAR imagery a challenge, and motion compensation (MoCo) a crucial task. This paper is aimed at studying on the MoCo technology for Mini SAR mounted on UAV. Practical data processing is presented to primarily demonstrate the validity of our proposed approach.