A Plane-Wave Synthesis Approach for 3D Monostatic RCS Prediction from Near-Field Measurements

Abstract

A plane-wave synthesis approach for determining the 3D monostatic radar cross section from a set of near-field measurements is presented. Compared to image based techniques, it does not suffer from inaccuracies in the case of multiple interactions. At the same time, very general measurement setups are possible without introducing severe truncation errors and the resulting field transformation problem can still be solved efficiently, due to the implementation based on propagating plane-wave expansions of the Green’s function. The theory of the algorithm is first outlined and then validated using simulated near-field and far-field data.