Terrain profile estimation over a synthetic terrain by using pulse-doppler radar
Author(s)
Advisor
Arıkan, OrhanDate
2010Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
The systems used for terrain profile estimation arise when the safety flight issues
in civil flight transport and in military applications become important. These
systems are developed for the purpose of terrain avoidance and safe flight. In
this thesis, we study two techniques in estimating the terrain profile of the synthetically
generated terrain which is achieved by means of signal processing. The
estimation performance of the techniques is observed according to the results of
flight simulations realized on the simulation environment. In the simulations, an
aircraft with a pulse-Doppler radar scans a synthetic terrain according to the
scanning patterns to generate the received signals. The techniques that we propose,
are applied to the output of the pulse-Doppler process. The first technique
is based on the usage of the first and the middle reflection range points in the
clutter received signal. An adaptive thresholding method is developed for robust
detection of these points. Accurate detection of these range points is crucial in
the estimation performance of the first approach. The other technique uses the
relation between the elevation angle θ and the clutter received signal amplitude ratio of the two receiver antennas R1 and R2 in finding the θ angles of the reflections
in corresponding range values. In this approach, accurate estimation of the
angle of arrival is important on the performance of estimation. Especially for far
ranges, the errors in the estimation become more sensitive to the errors in the
elevation angle θ. Finally, over a set of synthetically generated terrain profiles,
the error performance of these two techniques are investigated and compared.
Keywords
Pulse-Doppler ProcessingFractal Methods
Synthetic Environments
Terrain Maps
Terrain Avoidance
Pulse-Doppler Radars
Detection