Joint physical optics and FDTD analysis of microwave scattering

A simple preprocessing algorithm of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data has been suggested. As the first step the information about the location of important non-dispersive scatterers predicted by the Physical Optics (PO) approximation is extracted and the corresponding SAR image is built. This image in many cases is similar to the "optical" image of the target and can be useful in target identification and training of human operators. As the next step more information can be extracted from more accurate approximations of the real target response, such as the GTD approximation, FDTD or other numerical simulation. This additional information describes a shape of a specific scatterer predicted by PO. Extraction of the magnitude of the scatterers and their dispersive properties by conventional spectral estimation techniques can be simplified if time localization is used. The resonant behaviour of the target response can also be ignored which results in more clean and recognizable SAR images