Bounding Volume Hierarchy-Assisted Fast SAR Image Simulation Based on Spatial Segmentation

Abstract

In order to improve the simulation efficiency under the premise of ensuring the fidelity of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulation images, we propose a BVH-assisted fast SAR image simulation method based on spatial segmentation. The beam scanning model is established based on RD imaging geometric relation, and the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) algorithm is used to assist in obtaining the time-varying latticed radiation and shadow areas within the radar beam, combining them with the real-time position of the sensors to complete the simulation of the electromagnetic (EM) wave transmission. The ray tracing algorithm is used to calculate the multiple backscatter fields of EM waves, including various material properties of the target surface. The SAR spatial traversal is adopted to spatially segment the latticed radiation area, and the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) kernel function is designed using the echo matrix cell method to make each cell of the target echo matrix as a subfield of the backscattering field, and the position of the echo matrix cell is traversed to obtain the target backscattering field. The target simulated echo is processed by the range Doppler (RD) imaging algorithm to obtain the SAR-simulated image. The simulation results show that compared with a CPU single-thread simulation, the simulation speed of the proposed method is significantly improved, and the SAR simulation image has high structural similarity with the real image, which fully verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords

• SAR image simulation
• ray tracing
• multiple backscatter
• echo simulation
• bounding volume hierarchies
• CUDA