An Accelerated Shooting and Bouncing Ray Method Based on GPU and Virtual Ray Tube for Fast RCS Prediction

An accelerated shooting and bouncing ray (SBR) method is presented in this letter to improve the efficiency of radar cross section prediction for electrically large and complex objects. The SBR method is inefficient because it needs to trace a large number of ray tubes. Therefore, its efficiency can be improved by reducing the amount of ray tubes and increasing the speed of ray tracing. In this letter, we use rays instead of ray tubes to reduce the amount of rays that need to be traced, and construct a virtual ray tube at the ray exit position for field integration. Moreover, ray tracing and integration operations are executed on the graphics processing unit to further improve the efficiency of SBR method. Several examples are designed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.