M-SPURT–Compressing the Target Characterization for a Fast Monostatic RCS Simulation

Abstract

Applications such as radar performance prediction and automatic target recognition (ATR) require a compact description of the target and the ability to simulate target signatures fast. The complexity of the target model often slows the estimation of the radar cross section (RCS). We propose a target characterization method that uses two separate techniques to compress the information and to simplify the computations: employing a value for the maximum carrier frequency for the RCS and considering only nearly specular scattering. While the latter also affects the accuracy of the RCS, the compression maintains the main characteristics of the signature and hypothetically the validity for ATR. We present computation time and disk space comparisons showing the significant decrease in required resources. The effect of the compression level on the RCS values and distribution, and high range resolution profiles is visualized. A radar measurement is presented as a comparison to show the general validity of the simulation method.