A new radar sensor for coastal and riverbank monitoring

Abstract

International audienceFor environmental management, remote sensing techniques are of major interest as they can provide global and local coverage of natural environments. Considering the visibility conditions that are often poor in outdoor environments (day/night cycles, clouds, shadows, fog, etc.), microwave system offers an alternative solution in order to overcome the difficulties of optical sensors. In order to deal with the need of high spatial resolution, close temporal acquisition, and low-cost data availability, we developed a small-sized microwave radar sensor called K2Pi. This radar is based on the principle of Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FM-CW) technology. This radar can be easily positioned on different vehicles, including boats. An application in simultaneous localization and mapping using scan matching of radar images (R-SLAM algorithm) has been developed in order to build radar map of the environment. The potentialities of the sensor are presented through an application of riverbank mapping