AN EVALUATION OF A RAY-TRACING VOLUME SOURCE FORMULATION OF WAVE SCATTERING

An evaluation of a ray-tracing volume source formulation of wave scatt ering is presented. The basis of the formulation is to combine the phy sically realistic interpretation of propagation as rays with an exact diffractive representation of scattering such as the volume source for mulation. The formulation has been used previously in inverse scatteri ng but an evaluation of its accuracy has not been performed for the co rresponding direct problem. In this paper the formulation of the techn ique is formally presented and a numerical evaluation of its accuracy is performed. Results are provided for a variety of cylindrical object s and comparisons are presented with exact results and also results fr om the Born approximation. The results indicate that indeed dramatic i mprovements over the Born approximation are possible.