• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.27 no.9
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• pp.854-864
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• 2016

The use of small drone platform has become a popular topic in these days but its application for SAR operation has been little known due to the burden of the payload implementation. Drone platforms are distinguished from the conventional UAV system by the increased vulnerability to the turbulences, control-errors and poor motion stability. Consequently, sophisticated motion compensation may be required to guarantee the successful acquisition of high quality SAR imagery. Extremely limited power and mass budgets may prevent the use of additional hardwares for motion compensation and the difficulty of SAR focusing is further aggravated. In this paper, we have carried out a feasibility study of mico-SAR drone operation. We present the image acquisition results from the preliminary flight tests and a quality assessment is followed on the experimental SAR images. The in-flight motion errors derived from the unique drone movements are investigated and attempts have been made to compensate for the geometrical and phase errors caused by motions against the nominal trajectory. Finally, the successful operation of drone SAR system is validated through the focussed SAR images taken over test sites.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.47 no.8
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• pp.566-573
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• 2019

In order to obtain high-quality images by motion compensation in the airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), accurate motion sensing in image acquisition section is necessary. Especially, reducing relative position error and discontinuity in motion sensing is important. To overcome the problem, we propose a pre-parametric error modeling (P-PEM) algorithm which is a real-time motion sensing algorithm for the airborne SAR in this paper. P-PEM is an extended version of parametric error modeling (PEM) method which is a motion sensing algorithm to mitigate the errors in the previous work. PEM estimates polynomial coefficients of INS error which can be assumed as a polynomial in the short term. Otherwise, P-PEM estimates polynomial coefficients in advance and uses at image acquisition section. Simulation results show that the P-PEM reduces relative position error and discontinuity effectively in real-time.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.26 no.11
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• pp.1027-1030
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• 2015

In the airborne SAR, the motion errors induced by atmospheric turbulence decrease the resolution and increase the sidelobes. If the sidelobes are not properly compensated, the image quality is degraded. Thus, in this paper, we have introduced the sidelobe reduction method to increase the image quality. After we calculate the scene center based on the estimated squint angle for the flight path partitioned by the subaperture technique, we perform the motion compensation for the scene center. Then, after we perform the recursive sidelobe reduction for the region of interest in the reconstructed SAR image, we extend it for the full image.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.285-293
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• 2020

In this paper, to improve Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image quality, the effect of time synchronization error in the EGI/IMU (Embedded GPS/INS, Inertial Measurement Unit) integrated system is analyzed and state augmentation is applied to compensate it. EGI/IMU integrated system is widely used as a SAR motion measurement algorithm, which consists of EGI mounted to obtain the trajectory and IMU mounted on the SAR antenna. In an EGI/IMU integrated system, a time synchronization error occurs when the clocks of the sensors are not synchronized. Analysis of the effect of time synchronization error on navigation solutions and SAR images confirmed that the time synchronization error deteriorates SAR image quality. The state augmentation is applied to compensate for this and as a result, the SAR image quality does not decrease. In addition, by analyzing the performance and the observability of the time synchronization error according to the maneuver, it was confirmed that the time-variant maneuver such as rotational motion is necessary to estimate the time synchronization error adequately. In order to reduce the influence of the time synchronization error on the SAR image, the time synchronization error must be compensated by performing maneuver changing over time such as a rotation before SAR operation.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Information Technology
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.57-63
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• 2019

Motion errors which are caused by several reasons, non-ideal path, errors of navigation systems, and radar system errors, have to be corrected. Motion compensation methods can compensate the motion error, but not exactly. To correct these residual errors, several autofocus methods are invented. A popular method is phase gradient autofocus (PGA). PGA does not assume specific circumstances, such as isolated point targets and shapes of errors. PGA is an iterative and adaptive method, so that the processing time is the main problem for the real time processing. In this paper, the improved method to select targets for PGA is proposed to reduce processing time. The variances of image pixels are used to select targets with high SNR. The processing of PGA with these targets diminishes the processing time and iterations effectively. The processed results with real radar data, obtained by flight tests, show that the proposed method compensates errors well, and reduce working time.