Three dimensional electromagnetic model guided scattering center extraction

Scattering center extraction from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is a critical step in model-based SAR automatic target recognition (ATR). Three dimensional electromagnetic model (3D em-model) provides a concise and physically relevant description of target's electromagnetic scattering behavior by a set of representative scattering centers. In this paper, 3D em-model is used to guide scattering center extraction in SAR data. Firstly, 3D em-model is projected to the 2D measurement plane to predict the scattering region and the attributed parameters of each scattering center. Then, scattering center is extracted in the corresponding region predicted by 3D em-model with the model predicted parameters as an initial guess. Finally, a search strategy is adopted to optimize the scattering region and find the optimal parameters. Experiments using data simulated by a high-frequency electromagnetic code verify the validity of this method.