Improved FBAM and GO/PO Method for EM Scattering Analyses of Ship Targets in a Marine Environment

The combination of the fact-based asymptotic method (FBAM) and the geometrical optics and physical optics (GO/PO) hybrid method is an effective way to analyze the electromagnetic (EM) scattering from electrically large ship targets in a marine environment because it takes the multiple scattering of the ship targets into consideration as well as the coupling scattering field between the targets and the sea surface. However, regarding an electrically large marine scene that contains a large target, the occlusion judgement process for calculating the multiple scattering field and the coupling field makes it inefficient. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a physical mechanism-based improved method to reduce the invalid occlusion judgment between different patches on the composite ship–ocean scene, and this operation enhances the computational efficiency significantly. With the proposed method, radar cross section (RCS) results of different targets and composite ship–ocean scenes were calculated and compared with the original FBAM and GO/PO method. Numerical results showed that the proposed method had higher efficiency compared with the original method with the same good accuracy. In addition, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of a composite ship–ocean scene with different radar parameters and sea conditions were simulated with the proposed method for detection purpose. Finally, the proposed method was used to analyze the EM scattering characteristic of a marine environment with multiple ships.