A Fast Full-Wave Simulation Method for Characterization of Deeply Buried Targets in Bistatic SAR Imaging

Abstract

In this letter, a hybrid analytical and numerical simulation method is presented for the time-efficient calculation of bistatic scattering from the buried targets. This computation is used for a fixed transmitter and target location but for a moving receiver to generate the data set for a 3-D synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulation. In this method, initially, the current distribution on the target when illuminated by the transmitter (in the absence of the receiver) is calculated. Then, the receiver is used as a transmitter and its field is calculated everywhere in the lower half-space. The reciprocity is then used to find the open-circuit voltage across the receiver terminals due to the equivalent current distribution on the target. This approach substitutes <b xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</b> full-wave simulations for <b xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</b> sampling points required in SAR imaging with two simulations leading only to a factor of <b xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</b> <b xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">/</b> <b xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</b> reduction in the simulation time. The proposed method is validated by comparing it with the brute-force full-wave simulation method as well as by image reconstruction from the data set generated by the method.