A global scattering center representation of complex targets using the shooting and bouncing ray technique

We present a methodology to extract a global scattering center model a complex target. Using the shooting and bouncing ray technique, we first extract the three-dimensional (3-D) scattering center representations of the target at various aspect angles. Next the correspondence between scattering centers across angles are established by utilizing 3-D location information. The data are grouped based on 3-D scattering center locations and are organized in the form of angular visibility maps. Such data organization gives good insights into target physics and feature stability. Furthermore, we define a stability measure to quantitatively rank order the scattering centers based on their angular stability. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of such stable features by carrying out a five-target template-based matching experiment to estimate the angular pose of an unknown target.