Radar simulation of ship at sea using MOCEM V4 and comparison to acquisitions

Known as a useful tool to simulate SAR image, the MOCEM software has been recently extended. Now, its version 4 includes new features to simulate the radar raw data of a maritime scene composed of a ship on a dynamic sea surface. This paper describes the latest developments of the software and illustrates the work done in the context of a cooperation involving FFI (Norway) and DGA MI (France). Thanks to work done by Alyotech, MOCEM now benefits from GPU computation. This offers to take into account the ship motion in the computation of the raw data for SAR and ISAR simulations. It offers to display, in real time, the phenomena of delocalization, defocusing and deformations encountered in images when dealing with complex and realistic ship motion. In the first phase of the cooperation FFI and DGA MI have produced a methodology of how to build a 3D EM model of ships using rough CAD models (bought from internet provider). Some works have been done to adapt them to an EM application and to allocate EM properties. In a second step, simulations have been done to produce raw data to be been processed with SAR/ISAR algorithms. In parallel, real acquisitions have been done by FFI using the PicoSAR radar (bought from SELEX). In the end, simulations and measurements have been compared in order to demonstrate that simulation has reached a high level. Therefore, simulation of a new radar equipment has become a real option to optimize processing, reduce flight tests or for the training of future users, such as radar operators of a maritime patrol aircraft.