A Forward Approach to Establish Parametric Scattering Center Models for Known Complex Radar Targets Applied to SAR ATR

This paper presents a forward approach to establish parametric scattering center models for known complex radar targets. In this approach, an automatic technique based on ray tracing and clustering is first developed to extract scattering centers directly from the computer-aided design (CAD) model of the targets. Following this, a set of forward methods is developed to determine the physically relevant parameters of two-dimension (2-D) attributed scatterers, such as type, amplitude, position and length. Finally, this approach is validated through the parametric model establishment of two complex targets and good agreement has been demonstrated between the reconstructed and actual radar characteristics. Different from the familiar inverse extraction approaches, the proposed approach provides a new forward way of constructing radar targets' feature database based on 2-D parametric scattering center model, which will ultimately facilitate the feature matching in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) system.