Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2010.00179

System Design and Analysis for Energy-Efficient Passive UAV Radar Imaging System using Illuminators of Opportunity

Zhichao Sun·Junjie Wu·Gary G. Yen·Hang Ren·Hongyang An·Jianyu Yang
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can provide superior flexibility and cost-efficiency for modern radar imaging systems, which is an ideal platform for advanced remote sensing applications using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology. In this paper, an energy-efficient passive UAV radar imaging system using illuminators of opportunity is first proposed and investigated. Equipped with a SAR receiver, the UAV platform passively reuses the backscattered signal of the target scene from an external illuminator, such as SAR satellite, GNSS or ground-based stationary commercial illuminators, and achieves bi-static SAR imaging and data communication. The system can provide instant accessibility to the radar image of the interested targets with enhanced platform concealment, which is an essential tool for stealth observation and scene monitoring. The mission concept and system block diagram are first presented with justifications on the advantages of the system. Then, a set of mission performance evaluators is established to quantitatively assess the capability of the system in a comprehensive manner, including UAV navigation, passive SAR imaging and communication. Finally, the validity of the proposed performance evaluators are verified by numerical simulations.

Explore related subjects

eess.SPcs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zhichao Sun, Junjie Wu, Gary G. Yen, Hang Ren, Hongyang An, Jianyu Yang. 2021-05-08. System Design and Analysis for Energy-Efficient Passive UAV Radar Imaging System using Illuminators of Opportunity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.00179

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Circulant ADMM-Net for Fast High-resolution DoA Estimation

This paper introduces CADMM-Net and CHADMM-Net, two deep neural networks for direction of arrival estimation within the least-absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) framework. These two networks are based on a structured deep unfolding of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm through the use of circulant as well as Hermitian-circulant matrices. Along with a computational complexity of $\mathcal{O}(N\log(N))$ per layer for the inference, where $N$ is the length of the dictionary $\mathbf{A}$, they additionally exhibit a memory footprint of $N$ and approximately half of $N$ for CADMMNet and CHADMM-Net, respectively, compared with $N^{2}$ for ADMM-Net. Furthermore, these structured networks exhibit a competitive performance against ADMM-Net, LISTA, TLISTA, and THLISTA with respect to the detection rate, the angular root-mean square error, and the normalized mean squared error.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

BASIIS: Bistatic Angular Sampling and Interpolation for ISAC Setups

Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) is a defining feature of 6G, extending cellular networks with radar-like sensing at limited additional overhead. In bistatic deployments, sensing requires coordinating the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) arrays to scan the Cartesian product of angle of departure and arrival, resulting in a four-dimensional sampling problem in the angular domain. This work establishes a complete angular sampling framework for bistatic ISAC, extending the DFT-based optimal-sampling methodology to the full azimuth and elevation domains of both arrays. We show that the bistatic geometry couples the TX and RX elevation angles, and represent this coupling through the ortho-baseline coarray, a virtual array that captures the joint elevation aperture of the array pair. From the coarray we derive a minimal sampling and interpolation scheme, near-lossless and realizable with any beamforming architecture. Monte Carlo simulations confirm the proposed minimal acquisition essentially equalizes the detection accuracy of dense oversampled imaging while acquiring 3 to 5 times fewer TX-RX direction pairs. This allows having bistatic operations with drastically reduced overhead on the radio resource usage of ISAC systems.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Centroid Angle Estimation of Multiple Scatterers Using Monopulse Radar with Frequency Diversity

The monopulse technique determines the angle of a target by comparing signals from two narrow beams, yielding a precise angular estimate with low complexity. However, it struggles to resolve multiple closely spaced scatterers within the same resolution cell. Existing methods for estimating multiple scatterer angles involve complex signal processing and system modifications. We propose an effective method to estimate the angular centroid of scatterers using the mode of monopulse angle estimates. A semi-analytic expression for the angle estimate distribution is derived, confirming that its mode aligns with the centroid. To enhance estimation accuracy, we employ frequency diversity to reduce sample correlation. Numerical results validate the advantages of the proposed method, demonstrating superior performance over conventional techniques with low complexity.

eess.SP↗