A feasibility study of microwave UAV imaging based on multi-station polarimetric radars

Effective regulation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is crucial to social and public safety. In this paper, a microwave UAV imaging method is proposed for multi-station polarimetric radars. A polarimetric far-field scattering model is built to formulate the inverse scattering problem for various multi-station radar configurations. \(\mathscr {L}_1\) ${\mathcal{L}}_1$ -norm regularization is incorporated in the inversion to realize a high spatial resolution. Numerical experiments are carried out with FEKO taking a typical quadcopter UAV as the target. Reconstruction results with polarization dependence of bistatic and multi-station radar configurations and multiple observation ranges are given. A spatial resolution study reveals the resolution of the proposed algorithm and analyzes the relationship between resolution and multiple factors. The results validate the feasibility of microwave UAV imaging with multi-station polarimetric radars.