A high-precision SAR echo simulation method based on FDTD

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) echo simulation offers a low-cost and convenient way to obtain high-resolution images of targets, and plays an important role in system design and algorithm validation. Although high frequency approximation simulation is widely used, it is considered to be imprecise when calculating scattering field of fine structures, such as exhaust pipes and groove structures, especially in low frequency band. In this paper, a finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) based method is proposed for high-precision SAR echo simulation. In this method, scattering process of electromagnetic wave is accurately simulated to obtain equivalent electric and magnetic current on the surface of the target. Also, a near-to-far-field transformation is applied to the equivalent electric and magnetic current to calculate the field at the receiving antenna. In this transformation, a waveform forming method is introduced to simulate stripmap SAR echoes. By introducing this method, the usage of FDTD in one single simulation can be greatly reduced. The experiments show that proposed method can significantly improve the efficiency of the simulation while maintaining echo accuracy.