Status and Prospects of Electromagnetic Scattering Echoes Simulation from Complex Dynamic Sea Surfaces and Targets

Abstract

The ocean surface is a complicated dynamic system with considerable irregularity and nonrepetition in space and time. Sea clutter is the superposition of a large number of scatterer echoes generated by the radar electromagnetic signal irradiated to the sea surface, which is affected by wind, currents, waves, etc. and shows nonuniformity and nonsmoothness. The sea clutter signal has a certain interference effect on the detection of sea targets, especially under high sea conditions when the waves are furious, and the target signal is readily drowned out by the strong sea clutter signal, severely limiting the radar’s detection capability on sea targets. The investigation of sea clutter and target electromagnetic scattering properties serves as the foundation for improving the target detection capability in difficult marine environments. The formation of target echo data in the actual marine environment is of great significance for the analysis of sea clutter and target radar echo characteristics, as well as the supplementation of the actual measurement data set based on electromagnetic waves and the actual complex dynamic sea surface and target electromagnetic scattering mechanism. This study summarizes three key categories of echo simulation methods, analyzes the benefits, disadvantages, and adaptability of several categories of methods for the characteristics of the sea surface and target simulation scenarios, and provides some simulation results in order to make recent advancements and future trends of physics-based complex sea environment and target echo simulation methods more accessible to relevant researchers. It also introduces some echo datasets based on real measurements, which can facilitate scholars’ analysis of echo characteristics. Lastly, the trend toward developing complex sea surface and target echo simulation methods and characteristics for research is presented.

Keywords

• em scattering
• sea clutter
• sea echo analysis
• sar imaging
• target detection and recognition