DETECTION OF A BURIED OBJECT UNDER A SINGLE RANDOM ROUGH-SURFACE WITHANGULAR-CORRELATION FUNCTION IN EM WAVE SCATTERING

Detection of a buried object with an electromagnetic wave is often obs cured by the scattering of the random rough surface above the buried o bject. Recent studied show that by taking statistical averages, the an gular correlation function of scattering by random rough surfaces is s mall except along the memory line governed by the incident and scatter ed angles. In this article we study the angular correlation function o f the scattering of electromagnetic waves by a buried object under a s ingle random rough surface. Because the buried object is positioned un der a single random rough surface, the angular correlation function is calculated with frequency averaging. Numerical results show that the frequency-averaged angular correlation function still exhibits the mem ory line. It is also shown that the angular correlation function away from the memory line shown that the angular correlation function away from the memory line will suppress the rough surface scattering and ma ke the buried object scattering more conspicuous by a relative magnitu de of as large as 23 dB. Thus, the use of the angular correlation func tion will give better detection of a buried object than scattering int ensity. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.