Conditional Generative Learning Enabled Wireless UAV Sensing and Tracking via Point Cloud Imaging

Xinhong Dai, Yuan Gao, Hao Jiang, Xiaojun Yuan, Xin Wang

In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sensing and tracking problem, where a base station equipped with an antenna array continuously illuminates a flying UAV and exploits the reflected echoes for slot-wise point cloud imaging within its potential flight region. To accomplish this task, the imaging region for each slot is determined based on the prior of the historical UAV positions. Then, the UAV is represented by an electromagnetic point cloud in this region that contains its spatial information and electromagnetic properties (EPs), enabling the unified extraction of UAV position, attitude, and shape from the reconstructed point cloud. The EP point cloud imaging for the UAV based on echo signals is a complex inverse problem. To this end, we propose an Array-based Unified Generative UAV Sensing and Tracking (AUGUST) approach, which integrates a conditional channel encoding module and a generative decoding module. The encoding module incorporates position and signal-to-noise ratio embeddings to stabilize the UAV intrinsic feature extraction under fast UAV position and channel variations, and maps the encoded features to a latent space regularized by a learnable flow-based prior. The decoding module employs a diffusion model with a weighted training objective to reconstruct the UAV point cloud guided by the extracted features. The simulation results demonstrate that the reconstructed point clouds via the proposed AUGUST approach present higher fidelity compared to the benchmark schemes, thereby enabling a more accurate capture of the UAV attitude and shape information. The AUGUST approach also presents a substantial gain over the conventional model-based baseline in positioning performance.