A Correction Method to Systematic Phase Drift of a High Resolution Radar for Foreign Object Debris Detection

Abstract

Due to the small size and various types of foreign object debris (FOD), radar detection of FOD on airport runways is a great challenge, and there are often a large number of false alarms in the detection results. Arc-scanning synthetic aperture radar (AS-SAR) is an emerging method for detecting FOD targets, which achieves omnidirectional coverage with a very high azimuth resolution. However, this method faces a similar challenge. A direct way to reduce false alarms is to increase the detection threshold based on enhancing the target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and in this paper, the coherent accumulation of multiple images is used to improve the target SNR. The stable phase is also an important feature of the target distinguishing background. Therefore, it is important to maintain the stability of the target phase. Aiming at the systematic phase drift (SPD) caused by atmospheric disturbance and system hardware, a spatial and temporal model is established, a corresponding correction approach is proposed, and the performance of the correction approach is validated by field experiments.