Numerical simulation of scattering from rough surfaces: a wavelet-based approach

In this paper, a preliminary study is carried out to demonstrate the application of wavelets for improving the computation time and reducing computational memory required for evaluating the statistics of the scattered field from rough surfaces using the method of moments (MoM) in conjunction with a Monte Carlo simulation. In specific, Haar and the first order B-spline wavelet basis functions are applied to the MoM formulation of one-dimensional rough surfaces in order to compare the computation time and sparsity for wavelets in the same family but of higher order. Since the scattering coefficient (the second moment of the backscatter field per unit area) is a gentle function of the surface parameters and the radar attributes, it is demonstrated that a relatively high thresholding level can be applied to the impedance matrix, which leads to a sparser impedance matrix and faster computation time. It is also shown that applying a high threshold level the coefficients of the high-order wavelets would increase out of proportion, however, the effect of these current components averages out when computing the scattering coefficients. The resulting sparse impedance matrices are solved efficiently using fast search routines such as the conjugate gradient method. A systematic study is carried out to investigate the effect of different threshold levels on the accuracy versus computing speed criterion. The computed scattering coefficients are compared to previous results computed using a conventional pulse basis function as well as the existing theoretical solutions for rough surfaces. It is shown that wavelet basis functions provide substantial reductions in both memory requirements and computation time.