Comparison of Different Height Estimation Sources on the Performance of a UAV-mounted MIMO-SAR Ground Penetrating Radar System

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a key technology for inspecting the underground, as it allows the detection of both metallic and dielectric targets. In the last few years, the integration of GPR systems on board unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been proposed for the detection of buried explosive threats. These systems can provide high-resolution images of the underground by coherently combining measurements gathered across the area under inspection, which in turn requires a high-accuracy positioning system. This contribution assess the performance of a multiple-input multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO-SAR) GPR system when different sensors are used to estimate the UAV height.