Plane-Wave Synthesis and RCS Extraction via 3-D Linear Array SAR

Abstract

This letter presents an improved back-projection (BP) technique for far-field radar cross section (RCS) feature extraction from near-field measurement. The presented technique can synthesize a plane-wave response from a 2-D near-field planar scanner and obtain a 3-D scattering coefficient image. Due to the 3-D resolving power, it can spatially extract different parts of a complex object, or target’s scattering coefficient from the whole image which may include environment noise such as ground and support. From the 3-D scattering coefficient image, far-field RCS can be obtained as a function of direction and frequency. Simulations of RCS feature extraction for three squares and a 3-D complex-shaped electric-large car model are presented to validate the improved BP method.