SAR Imaging of Surface Target Using

High Frequency Electromagnetic Method

Wei Yang, Tse-Tong Chia, Chun-Yun Kee and Chao-Fu Wang
Temasek Laboratories
National University of Singapore, Singapore
5A Engineering Drive 1, #09-02, Singapore 117411
Email: tslyw@nus.edu.sg
AbstractThe physical optics and shooting bouncing ray
method are combined to rapidly compute the electromagnetic
(EM) scattering from surface targets. In order to avoid modeling
the infinite rough sea/ground, image theory and its modification
are used to account for the EM interactions with minimal
additional computation resource. Therefore, this proposed
method is beneficial to generate massive backscatter data for the
synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging.
Index TermsEM scattering, surface target, synthetic
aperture radar, multipath effect, physical optics, shooting and
bouncing ray method.

I. INTRODUCTION
For the last couple of decades, the synthetic aperture radar
(SAR) has been primarily utilized for surveillance applications
to better understand and interpret terrains and associated
geological events [1], as well as surface targets such as ship on
sea surface and tank on ground.
In order to generate the massive backscatter data required
for SAR imaging, an analytical method combining physical
optics and the shooting and bouncing ray method with image
theory is proposed to effectively solve realistic engineering
problems. In our approach, the rough surface is not physically
modeled, which significantly reduces memory and computation
time. The influence of multipath on the overall scattering and
the SAR image are handled by modification of the image
theory.
II. EM SIMULATION
For the imaging scenario shown for the case of a ship on a
sea surface in Fig. 1, the overall backscattered field in
general consists of five scattering components (due to five
different paths). The sum of the first four scattering
components of the ship (with its electromagnetic (EM)
interactions between it and the sea) is usually called the
difference-field scattering . The fifth component, , is the
backscatter from the sea. Thus, . As the
higher order scattering components are typically much smaller
than these five components, they can be ignored.

Fig. 1: Five components of scattering for a ship on a sea surface.

A. Difference-Field Scattering
The aforementioned four scattering components are as
follow: 1) the direct backscatter from the ship, 2) the
interaction from ship-sea-radar, 3) the interaction from seaship-radar, and 4) the interaction from sea-ship-sea-radar. The
scattering components of 2 to 4 arise from multipath effects.
The four components can be obtained with the help of an
imaged induced electric current and an imaged incident plane
wave as shown in Fig. 2. In Fig. 2(a), the induced electric
current and its imaged current correspond to the direct
scattering from the ship and the scattering from ship to sea,
respectively. In Fig. 2(b), the imaged incident wave
(represented by which is the image of the original
incident wave vector ), the induced electric current and
its imaged current correspond to scattering from sea to ship
and from sea to ship then to sea, respectively. For the paths 2
to 4, the Fresnel reflection coefficients and the roughness
parameter are used to account for the reflection from the
rough (dielectric) sea surface [2]. Therefore, only the rays
illuminating the ship are required without the need to model
the rough surface. For each incidence angle, the physical
optics and shooting and bouncing rays [3,4] are used to
rapidly compute the scattering as a function of frequency so
that the rays are only traced once.

(a) Imaged induced electric current (b) Imaged incident plane wave
Fig. 2: Image theory for four scattering components.

c
978-1-4673-7297-8/15/$31.00 2015
IEEE

161

B. Sea Surface Scattering

The sub-facet model is applied to solve for from the
extra-large sea surface in Fig. 1. The sea surface is firstly
divided into sub-facets. The sub-facets are solved via
physical optics. The total scattering fields are a summation of
the scattering from these sub-facets. More details can be found
in [1].

As mentioned earlier, only the ray tubes illuminating the

ship are required to be traced. There is also no need to model
the rough surface. Compared to the free-space problem, the
proposed method requires almost the same amount of RAM
while consuming less than twice the CPU, as shown in Table 1.
Note that the simulations were run on a LINUX platform with
Intel CoreTM E5-4650 2.70GHz processor.

III. SAR SIMULATION

An example of a vessel ship model that is 140m long, 18m
wide and 17m high, is shown in Fig. 3. The simulation
parameters are as follow: downrange and cross-range
resolutions are m, the sea surface is 20060 m2,
frequency range is 2.9253.075GHz; azimuth range is
 88.691.4, 45, frequency azimuth samples =
20060.
Three sea states (0, 1, 2) corresponding to the averaged
wind speeds over sea 0.1m/s, 2.5m/s, 4.5m/s are simulated. The
SAR images are shown in Fig. 4. It can be observed that
multipath effects due to the sea surface and sea states can cause
ambiguity in interpretation of the images. This observation is
also borne out in the difference field scattering as shown in Fig.
5 for an incidence angle of (45, 90). It is interesting that the
scattering of the ship in sea state 2 is similar to that of the ship
in free-space.

Fig. 5 Comparsions of scattering under different sea states.

Table 1. Computation costs comparison.
RAM (MBytes)
CPU time (minutes)
Ship in free-space
167
2,097
Ship in sea state 1
168
2,846

Fig. 3: A frigate model.

(a) sea state 0

IV. CONCLUSION
A high frequency method combining physical optics and
the shooting and bouncing ray method with image theory has
been developed to calculate the EM scattering from surface
targets. The method does not require the physical modeling of
the rough sea/ground surface. We plan to further improve the
computational efficiency of the method with the use of GPU
so that wide-angle wide-bandwidth scattering data of surface
targets can be expeditiously generated.
REFERENCES

(b) sea state 1

(c) sea state 2

Fig.4: SAR image of frigate under different sea states.

162

[1] M. Zhang, H. Chen, H. C. Yin, Facet-based investigation on

EM scattering from electrically large sea surface with two-scale
profiles: theoretical model, IEEE Transaction on Geoscience
and Remote Sensing, vol. 49, pp. 1967-1975, 2011.
[2] F. Xu and Y. Q. Jin, Bidirectional analytic ray tracing for fast
computation of composite scattering from electric-large target
over a randomly rough surface, IEEE Transaction on Antennas
Propagation, vol. 57, pp. 1495-1505, 2009
[3] L. Lozano, I. Gonzlez, M. J. Algar, and F. Ctedra, Efficient
RCS analysis of complex targets on infinite ground
plane, Antennas and Propagation Society International
Symposium, Chicago, IL, pp.1-2, 2012
[4] S. Kashyap and A. Louie, RCS of an object inclined to a
ground plane, Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, vol.
18, no. 1, pp. 50-54, 1998

2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR)