PhD Defense Peter Brotzer
Congratulations to our team member Peter Brotzer on the successful defense of his PhD thesis!
In his dissertation, Peter explored how drones can help address limitations of conventional Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) platforms. As extreme weather events, such as floods or landslides, are expected to occur more frequently in the future, there is a need for effective and flexible monitoring technologies that can support rescue and recovery efforts. SAR technology already makes it possible to capture high-quality images. However, the use of traditional satellite and airborne SAR systems during extreme events remains limited due to their fixed scene geometry and delayed response times, which make fast and flexible deployment difficult. Drone-based SAR systems can overcome these limitations because of their fast deployment and flexible flight paths. However, previous studies have shown image quality issues, due to unstable flight trajectories.
Given the potential of drone-based SAR systems Peters motivation was to find solutions to improve their image quality and to demonstrate their usefulness for disaster mapping. One of the first challenges he encountered was the lack of an existing drone-based SAR system that met the requirements for his research. He built his own system, a drone based high-resolution SAR system operating at K-band. With this drone he conducted several experiments at three different test sites in Switzerland.
His results show that drone-based SAR systems can produce detailed 3D reconstructions through tomographic SAR (TomoSAR) processing. The 3D models generated by the drone matched the reference data from LiDAR scans. In addition, Peter demonstrated that using multi-aspect acquisitions significantly reduces imaging artifacts such as radar shadowing and layover.
Congratulations Peter on this great achievement!