A Micro-UAV-Radar System for Vegetation Height Inversion: a Feasibility Study

With its unique advantages, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) radar remote sensing has become an advanced means of forest resource investigation. At present, mainstream radar sensors are difficult to meet the needs of micro-UAV payloads due to the limitations of mass, size, and power. As a contribution to the topic, this paper designed a highly integrated, lightweight and reliable Micro-UAV-Radar system and developed a novel method for retrieving vegetation height information on this basis. In order to test the availability of the system, a feasibility study has been carried out in Mangrove Reserve, China on April 2021. The results of this flight campaign show that the vegetation height retrieved by our method can reach high accuracy. Compared with other approaches, the method proposed in this study, which has lower data acquisition cost and simpler data processing, provides a novel way for retrieving vegetation height information.