An Accelerated Time-Domain Iterative Physical Optics Method for Analyzing Electrically Large and Complex Targets

A local area coupling-based time-domain iterative physical optics (TD-LIPO) method for the analysis of the scattering from electrically large and complex targets is proposed in this study. A modulated Gaussian-pulse plane wave is taken as the incident wave. Initially, via a ray-tracing mechanism, the current radiation iteration is limited to the local area, and the iteration times are determined by the bounce times. This approach can lower the enormous computation time. In addition, GPU parallel technology is also applied to accelerate the method. Finally, the TD-LIPO method is used to obtain the scattering echo data matrix of the target under different radar observation angles. An inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) is performed on the matrix to obtain the ISAR image under a small bandwidth and small angle. Numerical examples and ISAR images show that the accelerated local area coupling technique can significantly improve computational efficiency and verify feasibility in radar imaging.