A modeling process of equivalent terrains for reduced simulation complexity in radar scene matching applications

Abstract

This study proposes a modeling process of equivalent terrains to reduce the computational load and time of a full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulation. To verify the suitability of the proposed process, an original terrain model with a size of 3 m × 3 m is equivalently quantized based on the minimum range resolution of a radar, and the radar image of the quantized model is compared with that of the original model. The results confirm that the simulation time can be reduced from 407 hours to 162 hours without a significant distortion of the radar images, and an average estimation error of the quantized model (20.4 mm) is similar to that of the original model (20.3 mm).