AbstractIn this study, physical optics (PO) method have been applied to electromagnetic scattering problem related to high order inhomogeneous impedance cylinder of arbitrary shape. In the solution, induced electric and magnetic currents on the illuminated region of surface are expressed by means of incident field and high order inhomogeneous impedance boundary condition then scattered field is calculated using Huygens type Green's formula. Obtained scattering width results are compared with those obtained by other analytical and numeric methods and good agreements are observed especially monostatic case. Because of the fact that PO method does not need matrix inversion, which requires high CPU time, PO method also significantly reduces computer calculation time according the other methods. In this study, TM case is considered, but similar procedure can be easily applied to TE case and even also three‐dimensional inhomogeneous impedance objects using dyadic Green's functions as well. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 49: 1031–1036, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.22339