Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) is attracting growing interest nowadays for several remote sensing applications. As a bistatic radar, the transmitter and the receiver are not co-located and in the special case of GNSS-R, the GNSS satellites are acting as transmitters and the receiver can be mounted either in a static position or onboard a aircraft or low orbit satellite. Various information about the surface from where the GNSS signals are reflected or scattered can be extracted by means of reflected signal strength, code delay, carrier phase delay, interference with direct GNSS signals and so on. Possible applications cover soil moisture retrieval, ice topography and thickness detection, snow depth estimation, vegetation coverage, sea state monitoring such as sea wind and surface roughness, sea salinity… In this work, soil moisture retrieval was mostly focused on. Hardware including antennas and receivers was studied and designed. Our first strategy of soil moisture retrieval is to apply a single Left Hand Circular Polarization (LHCP) antenna for reflected signal reception. Therefore multiple types of antennas such as the helix antenna, the patch antenna and several commercial antennas were designed, simulated or tested in the anechoic chamber. Two receiver solutions were used in our group and both of them apply the SiGe GPS frontend. The first solution is a PC based one: the collection and store of the raw incoming reflected GPS signals were done by the NGrab software (designed by NAVSAS Group of Politecnico di Torino) installed in a standard PC. The other solution was developed in our group and it is operated by a single Hackberry board, which consists of power supply, storage subsystem and customized Linux Debian operating system. The light weight and small size enable this compact receiver to perform flight measurement onboard UAVs. Both of the above mentioned receivers only store raw sampled data and no real time signal processing is performed on board. Post processing is done by Matlab program which makes correlations in both time and frequency domain with incoming signals using the local generated GPS C/A code replica. The so-called Delay Doppler Map (DDM) is therefore generated through this correlation. Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) can be calculated through Delay Waveform (DW) which is extracted from DDM at the Doppler frequency where the correlation peak exists. Received signal power can be obtained knowing the noise power which is given in a standard equation. In order to better plan a static measurement and to georeference specular points on the surface, programs for georeferencing specular points on either Google Maps or an x-y plane centered at the receiver position were developed. Fly dynamics in terms of roll, pitch and yaw influencing the antenna gain due to the variation of incident angles were also studied in order to compensate the gain to the received signal. Two soil moisture retrieval algorithms were derived corresponding to two receiving schemes. The first one is for the receiving of only LHCP reflected signals. In this case, the surface is assumed to be perfectly smooth and the received signal is seen to consist of only coherent component caused by specular reflection. Dielectric constant can be retrieved from the processed SNR. Two measurement campaigns were carried out using this single LHCP system. The first campaign is a flight measurement overflown a big portion of rice fields when most of the fields were flooded. It was a test measurement on the SNR sensitivity to water/no-water surfaces and an attempt of dielectric constant retrieval was also performed. SNR showed good sensitivity to the surface water content and dielectric constant was also checked to be reasonable. The second campaign is in static positions and it includes two experiments. This campaign initially aimed at testing the sensitivity of the compact receiver to different surface moisture. Results of both SNR and retrieved dielectric constant showed to be coherent with the surface moisture changes. The other retrieval algorithm is for the receiving of both LHCP and RHCP reflected signals concurrently. The cross polarization power ratio (LHCP/RHCP) is believed to be independent of surface roughness by several previous studies and this idea was also verified during the deriving process for either specular reflection case (only coherent component) or diffuse scattering condition (incoherent component). For diffuse scattering, three well known models were applied which are the Kirchhoff Approximation in stationary-phase approximation (Kirchhoff Geometrical Optics, KGO), Kirchhoff Approximation in Physical Optics Approximation (KPO) and Small Perturbation Method (SPM). These three models cover different roughness surfaces from very rough (KGO) to slightly rough surfaces (SPM). All the derived results of cross polarization ratio for the three models were verified to be independent of surface properties and depend on only dielectric constant of soil and incident angle. A new application of GNSS-R technique for the possibility of detection of buried objects was firstly investigated by our group. It has the potential use for man-made mines detection in the military field. Two measurement campaigns were carried out and the variation of the SNR level due to the presence of a metallic object was investigated. The first measurement campaign was performed in a static condition on a sandy terrain to check the functionality of the system. And the presence of the metallic object was detected also in the case of wet terrain. In the second measurement campaign, the antenna was moving along a given path and the possibility of detecting the object dimensions was highlighted. The results show the possibility of adopting this technique on board a remotely controlled UAV for metal object and even its dimension detection. A measurement of snow depth attempting to relate it to reflected LHCP SNR is briefly presented and discussed in Chapter 7.

GNSS Reflectometry for land surface monitoring and buried object detection / Pei, Yuekun. - (2014). [10.6092/polito/porto/2586356]

GNSS Reflectometry for land surface monitoring and buried object detection

PEI, YUEKUN
2014

Abstract

Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) is attracting growing interest nowadays for several remote sensing applications. As a bistatic radar, the transmitter and the receiver are not co-located and in the special case of GNSS-R, the GNSS satellites are acting as transmitters and the receiver can be mounted either in a static position or onboard a aircraft or low orbit satellite. Various information about the surface from where the GNSS signals are reflected or scattered can be extracted by means of reflected signal strength, code delay, carrier phase delay, interference with direct GNSS signals and so on. Possible applications cover soil moisture retrieval, ice topography and thickness detection, snow depth estimation, vegetation coverage, sea state monitoring such as sea wind and surface roughness, sea salinity… In this work, soil moisture retrieval was mostly focused on. Hardware including antennas and receivers was studied and designed. Our first strategy of soil moisture retrieval is to apply a single Left Hand Circular Polarization (LHCP) antenna for reflected signal reception. Therefore multiple types of antennas such as the helix antenna, the patch antenna and several commercial antennas were designed, simulated or tested in the anechoic chamber. Two receiver solutions were used in our group and both of them apply the SiGe GPS frontend. The first solution is a PC based one: the collection and store of the raw incoming reflected GPS signals were done by the NGrab software (designed by NAVSAS Group of Politecnico di Torino) installed in a standard PC. The other solution was developed in our group and it is operated by a single Hackberry board, which consists of power supply, storage subsystem and customized Linux Debian operating system. The light weight and small size enable this compact receiver to perform flight measurement onboard UAVs. Both of the above mentioned receivers only store raw sampled data and no real time signal processing is performed on board. Post processing is done by Matlab program which makes correlations in both time and frequency domain with incoming signals using the local generated GPS C/A code replica. The so-called Delay Doppler Map (DDM) is therefore generated through this correlation. Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) can be calculated through Delay Waveform (DW) which is extracted from DDM at the Doppler frequency where the correlation peak exists. Received signal power can be obtained knowing the noise power which is given in a standard equation. In order to better plan a static measurement and to georeference specular points on the surface, programs for georeferencing specular points on either Google Maps or an x-y plane centered at the receiver position were developed. Fly dynamics in terms of roll, pitch and yaw influencing the antenna gain due to the variation of incident angles were also studied in order to compensate the gain to the received signal. Two soil moisture retrieval algorithms were derived corresponding to two receiving schemes. The first one is for the receiving of only LHCP reflected signals. In this case, the surface is assumed to be perfectly smooth and the received signal is seen to consist of only coherent component caused by specular reflection. Dielectric constant can be retrieved from the processed SNR. Two measurement campaigns were carried out using this single LHCP system. The first campaign is a flight measurement overflown a big portion of rice fields when most of the fields were flooded. It was a test measurement on the SNR sensitivity to water/no-water surfaces and an attempt of dielectric constant retrieval was also performed. SNR showed good sensitivity to the surface water content and dielectric constant was also checked to be reasonable. The second campaign is in static positions and it includes two experiments. This campaign initially aimed at testing the sensitivity of the compact receiver to different surface moisture. Results of both SNR and retrieved dielectric constant showed to be coherent with the surface moisture changes. The other retrieval algorithm is for the receiving of both LHCP and RHCP reflected signals concurrently. The cross polarization power ratio (LHCP/RHCP) is believed to be independent of surface roughness by several previous studies and this idea was also verified during the deriving process for either specular reflection case (only coherent component) or diffuse scattering condition (incoherent component). For diffuse scattering, three well known models were applied which are the Kirchhoff Approximation in stationary-phase approximation (Kirchhoff Geometrical Optics, KGO), Kirchhoff Approximation in Physical Optics Approximation (KPO) and Small Perturbation Method (SPM). These three models cover different roughness surfaces from very rough (KGO) to slightly rough surfaces (SPM). All the derived results of cross polarization ratio for the three models were verified to be independent of surface properties and depend on only dielectric constant of soil and incident angle. A new application of GNSS-R technique for the possibility of detection of buried objects was firstly investigated by our group. It has the potential use for man-made mines detection in the military field. Two measurement campaigns were carried out and the variation of the SNR level due to the presence of a metallic object was investigated. The first measurement campaign was performed in a static condition on a sandy terrain to check the functionality of the system. And the presence of the metallic object was detected also in the case of wet terrain. In the second measurement campaign, the antenna was moving along a given path and the possibility of detecting the object dimensions was highlighted. The results show the possibility of adopting this technique on board a remotely controlled UAV for metal object and even its dimension detection. A measurement of snow depth attempting to relate it to reflected LHCP SNR is briefly presented and discussed in Chapter 7.
2014
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11583/2586356
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