An Accelerated PO for Fast RCS Prediction of Electrically Large Objects

This paper proposes an accelerated physical optics (PO) method to efficiently calculate monostatic radar cross section (RCS) of electrically large objects. The shadowing test of objects is one of the most time-consuming processes of PO method. In traditional shadowing methods, the triangular facets used to describe an object are small and numerous, and each facet needs to perform occlusion judgment with all other facets. A large number of occlusion judgments render traditional methods inefficient. To improve the computational efficiency of the PO method, we propose a facet grouping method based on the scan line technique, termed the scan line grouping method (SLGM), and combine it with facet subdivision technique to accelerate the shadowing test of objects. The proposed method can rapidly group facets through SLGM, reducing the number of occlusion judgments and thereby significantly improving the computational efficiency of the PO method. The simulation results of several experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.