Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flying at low altitude are becoming more and more a serious threat in civilian and military scenarios. In recent past, numerous incidents have been reported where small UAV were flying in security areas leading to serious danger to public safety or privacy. The detection and tracking of small UAV is a widely discussed topic. Especially, small UAV flying at low altitude in urban environment or near background structures and the detection of multiple UAV at the same time is challenging. Field trials were carried out to investigate the detection and tracking of multiple UAV flying at low altitude with state of the art detection technologies. Here, we present results which were achieved using a heterogeneous sensor network consisting of acoustic antennas, small frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) RADAR systems and optical sensors. While acoustics, RADAR and LiDAR were applied to monitor a wide azimuthal area (360◦) and to simultaneously track multiple UAV, optical sensors were used for sequential identification with a very narrow field of view.

Date Published: 2 May 2017
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 10200, Signal Processing, Sensor/Information Fusion, and Target Recognition XXVI, 102001A (2 May 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2261930

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10200:
Signal Processing, Sensor/Information Fusion, and Target Recognition XXVI
Ivan Kadar, Editor(s)