Three-dimensional scattering center extraction using the shooting and bouncing ray technique

We present a technique to extract the three-dimensional (3-D) scattering center model of a complex target. Using the shooting and bouncing ray technique, we first generate the 3-D inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image of the target based on a one-look ISAR algorithm. In step two, we use the image processing algorithm CLEAN to extract the 3-D position and strength of the scattering centers from the 3-D ISAR image. Various implementation issues related to computation time and memory are addressed and an efficient scheme is presented to accomplish the 3-D scattering center extraction. Several examples ranging from simple canonical structures to complex targets are presented to demonstrate the validity of the extraction scheme and the usefulness of the resulting 3-D scattering center model.