Global Scattering Center Representation of Target Wide-Angle Single Reflection/Diffraction Mechanisms Based on the Multiple Manifold Concept

Many radar applications, such as system design and testing and target detection and recognition, need to compress and rapidly reconstruct the target-scattering characteristics data through some suitable sparse representations, while the scattering center (SC) model resulting from different scattering mechanisms is just a prospective candidate. For the target scattering characteristics data with single reflection/diffraction mechanisms, the multimanifold structures of wide-angle SCs were revealed in light of asymptotic high-frequency theory and ray theory of electromagnetic field. Then the multimanifold clustering and curve/surface fitting algorithms are introduced to construct the target global SC (GSC) model. Compared with simulation data of sphere-cone target, the RCS at elevation 90°, azimuth 0–180° can be accurately reconstructed by only 77 parameters, the compress rate and root mean square error are 0.66 and 1.17 dB respectively. Simulation results showed that the GSC model could greatly compress the wide-angle scattering data while ensuring a suitable reconstruction accuracy. The proposed multimanifold GSC representation is convenient to implement and can effectively replace the redundant original scattering characteristics data.