Compact Synthetic Aperture Radar Research Articles

Preliminary study of a millimeter wave FMCW InSAR for UAS indoor navigation.

Small autonomous unmanned aerial systems (UAS) could be used for indoor inspection in emergency missions, such as damage assessment or the search for survivors in dangerous environments, e.g., power plants, underground railways, mines and industrial warehouses. Two basic functions are required to carry out these tasks, that is autonomous GPS-denied navigation with obstacle detection and high-resolution 3D mapping with moving target detection. State-of-the-art sensors for UAS are very sensitive to environmental conditions and often fail in the case of poor visibility caused by dust, fog, smoke, flames or other factors that are met as nominal mission scenarios when operating indoors. This paper is a preliminary study concerning an innovative radar sensor based on the interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) principle, which has the potential to satisfy stringent requirements set by indoor autonomous operation. An architectural solution based on a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) scheme is proposed after a detailed analysis of existing compact and lightweight SAR. A preliminary system design is obtained, and the main imaging peculiarities of the novel sensor are discussed, demonstrating that high-resolution, high-quality observation of an assigned control volume can be achieved.

A 12-bit compact column-parallel SAR ADC with dynamic power control technique for high-speed CMOS image sensors

This paper presents a 12-bit column-parallel successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (SAR ADC) for high-speed CMOS image sensors. A segmented binary-weighted switched capacitor digital-to-analog converter (CDAC) and a staggered structure MOM unit capacitor is used to reduce the ADC area and to make its layout fit double pixel pitches. An electrical field shielding layout method is proposed to eliminate the parasitic capacitance on the top plate of the unit capacitor. A dynamic power control technique is proposed to reduce the power consumption of a single channel during readout. An off-chip foreground digital calibration is adopted to compensate for the nonlinearity due to the mismatch of unit capacitors among the CDAC. The prototype SAR ADC is fabricated in a 0.18 μm 1P5M CIS process. A single SAR ADC occupies 20 × 2020 μm2. Sampling at 833 kS/s, the measured differential nonlinearity, integral nonlinearity and effective number of bits of SAR ADC with calibration are 0.9/−1 LSB, 1/−1.1 LSB and 11.24 bits, respectively; the power consumption is only 0.26 mW under a 1.8-V supply and decreases linearly as the frame rate decreases.

Improved Compact Polarimetric SAR Quad-Pol Reconstruction Algorithm for Oil Spill Detection

An improved reconstruction algorithm is proposed for compact polarimetric (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) on oil spill detection. Based on the differences in statistical behavior between open and oil-covered sea surfaces, the proposed algorithm can iteratively reconstruct quad-pol SAR images from CP SAR data. During the experiment, it outperformed two existing compact SAR reconstruction algorithms in terms of both statistical and information theoretical analysis.

The Potential of Polarimetric and Compact SAR Data in Rice Identification

Rice is a major food staple in the world, and provides food for more than one-third of the global population. The monitoring and mapping of paddy rice in a timely and efficient manner is very important for governments and decision makers. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been proved to be a significant data source in rice monitoring. In this study, RADARSAT-2 polarimetric data were used to simulate compact polarimetry data. The simulated compact data and polarimetric data were then used to evaluate the information content for rice identification. The results indicate that polarimetric SAR can be used for rice identification based on the scattering mechanisms. The compact polarization RH and the RH/RL ratio are very promising for the discrimination of transplanted rice and direct-sown rice. These results require verification in further research.

A Unified Framework for General Compact and Quad Polarimetric SAR Data and Imagery Analysis

Dual and compact polarimetric (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provide more target information than single-polarization SAR systems with less stringent data requirements than fully polarimetric SAR systems. Considering the incomplete nature of CP data to establish the quad or fully polarimetric scattering matrix, the applied CP mode determines the captured scattering properties. Present formalism enables investigation of various CP modes (e.g., general elliptical transmission) and products for general target backscattering characterization. This is done through decomposition of quad-pol covariance and CP modeling of respective basic scattering mechanisms. On this basis, derivation of optimal CP modes and design of suitable CP products are explored. In this approach, the need for a priori target assumptions is removed. The link established between general CP and quad polarimetric covariance matrices can be used to examine target property assumptions using various CP modes data. Accordingly, means is also provided to explore a priori target property assumptions and their suitability required for expansion of 2 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\times$</tex></formula> 2 CP covariance matrix to perform the pseudo-quad-polarimetric covariance analysis.

On the use of compact polarimetry SAR for ship detection

Quad-pol data are generally acknowledged as providing the highest performance in ship detection applications using SAR data. Yet quad-pol data have half the swath width of single and dual-pol data and are thus less useful for maritime surveillance, where wide area coverage is crucial. Compact polarimetry (CP) has been proposed as a compromise between swath width and polarization information. The circular-transmit-linear-receive (CTLR) CP data have certain engineering advantages over other CP configurations. CP data may be used to reconstruct a reduced quad-pol covariance matrix (termed pseudo-quad, or PQ, data) and the potential of these data in terrestrial applications has recently been demonstrated. We present some of the first results on the use of CTLR data and reconstructed quad-pol data for ship detection. We use Radarsat-2 fine-quad (FQ) data to examine 76 ships over a range of incidence angles and ship orientations at low to moderate wind speeds. We examined the ship detection performance of full quad-pol and full-PQ data; several dual-pol configurations suggested in the literature, HV and PQ HV and the raw CTLR data. We find that the ship detection performance of the PQ HV data is the strongest of all the detectors we examined, with performance that was comparable to quad-pol data. Other strong performers were HV and CTLR data.