SDR-Implemented Ground-Based Interferometric Radar for Displacement Measurement

In this article, we demonstrate the use of general software-defined radio (SDR) hardware for ground-based interferometric radar (GBIR) system development for static target imaging and displacement estimation purposes. First, a system synchronization approach is proposed within the free and open-source framework GNU Radio, followed by a frequency-domain bandwidth synthesis method used to improve the range resolution with three different waveforms. Second, data preprocessing and target imaging methods are proposed to reduce the negative influences of practical nonideal factors and get high-quality target images. Finally, various experiments are conducted to show the performance of the developed SDR-GBIR system and the proposed methods. It is shown that high-resolution target image and high-accuracy displacement measurement can be obtained by our SDR-GBIR systems.