An Improved Ray-Tracing Algorithm for SBR-Based EM Scattering Computation of Electrically Large Targets

We put forward an improved ray-tracing algorithm to obtain a fast prediction of the radar cross section (RCS) for electrically large complex targets using the shooting and bouncing ray (SBR) method. Our algorithm employs a rope-based kd-tree data structure together with the neighbor-facet-tree based backward ray-tracing technique. The proposed algorithm shows excellent performance in the evaluation of scattering properties of the electrically large targets at high frequency. To assess and validate the proposed method, we compute the RCS of electrically small targets and of a realistic aircraft model and compare results with those of the traditional SBR method and multilevel fast multipole method. The agreement of the results together with the runtime performance demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our method.