Research on signatures of scattering centers shown in time-frequency representation

Scattering centers are important features of electromagnetic scattering at high frequencies. The aspect dependency of the amplitude and location of a scattering center has a significant influence on radar imaging and target recognition. Compared with other radar images, the Time-Frequency Representation (TFR) of radar returns more clearly presents features of scattering centers. In this paper, the signatures of TFR of different types of scattering centers are investigated theoretically and numerically. In numerical experiments, the scattering responses of several typical targets are computed by the full-wave numerical method. The conclusion of this paper on signatures of TFR of scattering centers can provide a theoretical reference for the feature extraction and target recognition from TFRs.