Millimeter waves sensor modeling and simulation

摘要

Guidance of weapon systems relies on sensors to analyze targets signature. Defense weapon systems also need to detect then identify threats also using sensors. One important class of sensors are millimeter waves radar systems that are very efficient for seeing through atmosphere and/or foliage for example. This type of high frequency radar can produce high quality images with very tricky features such as dihedral & trihedral bright points, shadows and lay over effect. Besides, image quality is very dependent on the carrier velocity and trajectory. Such sensors systems are so complex that they need simulation to be tested. This paper presents a state of the Art of millimeter waves sensor models. A short presentation of asymptotic methods shows that physical optics support is mandatory to reach realistic results. SE-Workbench-RF tool is presented and typical examples of results are shown both in the frame of Synthetic Aperture Radar sensors and Real Beam Ground Mapping radars. Several technical topics are then discussed, such as the rendering technique (ray tracing vs. rasterization), the implementation (CPU vs. GP GPU) and the tradeoff between physical accuracy and performance of computation. Examples of results using SE-Workbench-RF are showed and commented.