A Revisitation of the Phenomenological Approach with Applications to Radar Target Decomposition

摘要

This report highlights some results of a phenomenological approach to radar targets, with applications. The approach grew out of the common sense realization that only those target data are acceptable for discrimination and identification purposes which can be shown to relate in a physically meaningful way to basic target structure. Only then can data, often gathered at great expense, obtained for one type of system, be expected to be useful productively for a new system and hence improve efficiency and cost factors. Although these comments are almost self-evident and common sensical in nature, examples are given to show how this systematic approach has an important effect on the mathematical and practical development toward target identification (inverse) problems. The effect of antenna and target orientation angle on corrupting target information is stressed, in contrast to common practice to allow single H or V polarization data to be accepted as meaningful. The report summarizes the general target decomposition theorems, proved by the author in 1970. It shows that a single-coherent object is electromagnetically irreducible (it cannot be broken down mathematically as the incoherent sum of the smaller parts without violating physical principles). All this opens up new vistas for optimal signal processing schemes which extend the present predominantly scalar case to include vector scattering problems. It is hoped that by these efforts improved reliability with reduced costs for target discrimination and identification purposes can be achieved. (Author)