Wireless Imaging for Low-Altitude Surveillance: A New Paradigm for ISAC Networks

2026-07-28

AI Summary

This work addresses the urgent need for wide-area, dynamic, and fine-grained aerial surveillance driven by the rapid growth of low-altitude economies, which conventional sensing approaches struggle to fulfill. The paper proposes wireless imaging as a unified sensing paradigm within integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks, establishing a hierarchical framework that encompasses wide-area snapshot imaging, trajectory-aware dynamic imaging, and fine-grained target imaging. By leveraging collaborative sensing among distributed base stations and communication users, the framework enables comprehensive low-altitude domain awareness. The study innovatively introduces trajectory-aware dynamic imaging and high-resolution drone imaging, and defines a novel metric—“imaging coverage”—to evaluate sensing fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively supports wide-area monitoring, motion tracking and prediction, and detailed feature extraction of both hovering and flying drones, significantly enhancing low-altitude sensing performance.

Abstract

The rapid growth of the low-altitude economy calls for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks capable of robust flight monitoring. This article advocates wireless imaging as a unifying sensing paradigm that enables ISAC networks to function as comprehensive low-altitude guardians. We present a hierarchical imaging framework that enhances sensing capability from wide-area snapshot imaging to dynamic trajectory-aware imaging and target-centric fine-grained characterization. At the wide-area level, low-altitude sensing is reformulated as a spatial imaging problem, where distributed base stations and communication users collaboratively construct a holistic view of the aerial space. Building on this foundation, multi-frame dynamic imaging exploits temporal correlations to support robust trajectory tracking and prediction under mobility induced challenges such as occlusions. For security-critical scenarios, the framework further enables fine-grained imaging of flying and hovering uncrewed aerial vehicles, providing detailed characterization beyond conventional point-target abstractions. Additionally, we propose a novel evaluation metric named imaging coverage to examine the sensing fidelity of the proposed framework. Illustrative case studies demonstrate the potential of imaging in ISAC networks to support wide-area monitoring, motion-aware tracking, and fine-grained target analysis.

Problem

• low-altitude surveillance
• wireless imaging
• ISAC networks
• trajectory tracking
• fine-grained characterization

Innovation

• wireless imaging
• ISAC networks
• hierarchical imaging framework
• dynamic trajectory tracking
• imaging coverage