AN EFFICIENT REPRESENTATION FOR RADAR SCATTERING WITH THE USE OF THE GENETIC ALGORITHM

In order to obtain a more accurate, efficient representation of scatte ring behavior for radar targets and to allow better extrapolation of s cattering data from the sampled frequency band to a wide range, a mode ling procedure is presented for processing scattering data containing high-order diffraction terms. In this procedure, a more realistic f(al pha) model for scattering and the maximum-likelihood algorithm are emp loyed. In the model, the restriction of alpha being an integer multipl e of 1/2 has been removed, which results in highly accurate estimates. In addition, the genetic algorithm is used to overcome the issue of c onverging to local minima. An iterative simplex downhill minimization method is used to accelerate the optimization process. Computer simula tion shows superior noise performance of this modeling procedure. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.