Location reconstructions of attributed SCs by monopulse radar

Attributed scattering centres (SCs) of real radar targets are far more complex than ideal scatterers; their scattering amplitudes and locations are dependent on aspect angle, frequency and polarisation in different ways. Numerical results present in this work show that the reconstructed locations of the SCs by using monopulse radar are closely related with the aspect dependencies of the SCs. The influence on location reconstructions by aspect dependencies are investigated, and it is found that distributed SCs (DSCs) generally cause more serious errors in the reconstructed results than other types of SCs. To deal with this, a simple approach is presented, where the range profile (RP) with DSCs is discriminated from other RPs, and only the highest peak is selected as a true scattering source to be reconstructed. Two extended targets and a group of three targets are investigated for validation, and the results show good agreement between the numerical and analytical results, and the availability of this approach.