Interest in the use of active electro-optical(EO) sensors for non-cooperative target identification has steadily increased as the quality and availability of EO sources and detectors have improved. A unique and recent innovation has been the development of an airborne synthetic aperture imaging capability at optical wavelengths. To effectively exploit this new data source for target identification, one must develop an understanding of target-sensor phenomenology at those wavelengths. Current high-frequency, asymptotic EM predictors are computationally intractable for such conditions, as their ray density is inversely proportional to wavelength. As a more efficient alternative, we have developed a geometric optics based simulation for synthetic aperture ladar that seeks to model the second order statistics of the diffuse scattering commonly found at those wavelengths but with much lesser ray density. Code has been developed, ported to high-performance computing environments, and tested on a variety of target models.

Date Published: 13 May 2015
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9475, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XXII, 94750D (13 May 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2178268

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9475:
Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XXII
Edmund Zelnio; Frederick D. Garber, Editor(s)