A Novel Procedure for High Resolution Radar Signature Prediction of Near Field Targets

Abstract

A novel procedure for high resolution radar scattering signature prediction of near field targets is proposed and applied to radar-target end-game electromagnetic (EM) modeling as well as hard-ware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation. By introducing the concept of distinct wave propagation vector (DWPV), this paper develops formulations of near field version of physical optics (PO), Michaeli's equivalent edge currents (EEC) and iterative physical optics (IPO) to predict the high frequency wideband EM scattering from targets with perfect electric conducting (PEC) surfaces in the near field region. In order to characterize the variation of the near field scattering from a complex target with respect to time variant radar-target interaction by using solely one succinct radar image, an approach for two-dimensional (2-D) high resolution inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image sequence generation and synthesis is developed. Numerical results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed procedure to generate high resolution radar scattering signatures of near field targets with high fidelity.