Transient scattering by a metal cylinder covered with inhomogeneous lossy material is analyzed for application of radar systems to nondestructive testing of reinforced concrete structures. First, inhomogeneous lossy material that is a model of corrosion by rust is approximated by a cylindrical multilayered medium, and analytic solution of a scattered field in frequency domain is derived. Next, time domain scattering response is calculated from the frequency domain data by using the inverse Fourier transform. Numerical results of pulse responses indicate that corrosion rate of the concrete can be evaluated by checking the waveform distortion of the pulse responses.

An efficient bent waveguide and an optical power splitter with a resonator constructed by a metal-dielectric-metal plasmonic waveguide have been analyzed. The method of solution is the finite difference time domain (FD-TD) method with the piecewise linear recursive convolution (PLRC) method. The resonator can be realized by utilizing impedance mismatch at the connection between a narrow waveguide and an input/output waveguide. Numerical results for the bent waveguide show that transmission bands can be controlled by adjusting the length of the narrow waveguide. We have also shown that the optical power of the power splitter is entirely distributed into the output waveguide at the resonant wavelength and its distribution ratio can be controlled.

The Yasuura method is effective for calculating scattering problems by bodies of revolution. However dealing with 3-D scattering problems, we need to solve bigger size dense matrix equations. One of the methods to solve 3-D scattering is to use multipole expansion which accelerate the convergence rate of solutions on the Yasuura method. We introduce arrays of multipoles and obtain rapidly converging solutions. Therefore we can calculate scattering properties over a relatively wide frequency range and clarify scattering properties such as frequency dependence, shape dependence, and polarization dependence of 3-D scattering from perfectly conducting scatterer. In these numerical results, we keep at least 2 significant figures.

Gaussian rough surfaces can be characterized by two roughness parameters, the root-mean-square height and correlation length. For accurate estimation of these parameters from measured surface height-profile, data samples with sufficiently long record length are necessary. In this letter, an expression of correlation length in terms of a surface slope function is introduced in order to estimate correlation length and analytical expression of the data record length required for accurate estimation is derived. The result shows that the method using the slope function can reduce the data record length approximately 60% as compared to the commonly employed method using the correlation function. In order to check the result, a Monte Carlo simulation is also carried out and the validity of the result is confirmed.

An efficient sharply bent waveguide with a microcavity constructed by an air-bridge type two-dimensional photonic crystal slab is analyzed. The method of solution is the three-dimensional finite difference time domain (FD-TD) method. The bent waveguide has a microcavity structure that connects to an input and an output waveguide ports. The radius and position of air-holes surrounding the microcavity are modified to adjust the resonant frequency to the single-mode regime of the waveguides. It is confirmed that input optical power is transmitted efficiently to the output waveguide due to resonant tunneling caused by the microcavity.

A high-frequency approximate method for calculating the diffraction by a smooth convex surface is presented. The advantage of this method is the validity of it in the caustic region of the creeping rays where the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction (GTD) becomes invalid. The concept used in this method is based on the Method of Equivalent Edge Currents (EEC), and the equivalent line currents for creeping rays which are derived from the diffraction coefficients of the GTD are used. By evaluating the radiation integral of these equivalent line currents, the creeping ray contribution which is valid within the caustic region is obtained. In order to check the accuracy and the validity of the method, the diffraction problem by a perfectly conducting sphere of radius a is solved by applying the method, and the obtained results are compared with the exact and the GTD solutions. It is confirmed from the comparison that the failure of the GTD near the caustic is removed in this method and accurate solution is obtained in this area for high-frequency (ka8). Furthermore, it is also found that this method is valid in the backward region (0θ90, θ is an observation angle mesuered from an incident direction), whereas not in the forward region (90θ180).

A method for reducing ground clutter contribution from ground penetrating radar (GPR) data is proposed for discrimination of landmines located in shallow depth. The algorithm of this method is based on the Matching Pursuit (MP) that is a technique for non-orthogonal signal decomposition using dictionary of functions. As the dictionary of function, a wave-based dictionary constructed by taking account of scattering mechanisms of electromagnetic (EM) wave by rough surfaces is employed. Through numerical simulations, performance of ground clutter reduction is evaluated. The results show that the proposed method has good performance and is effective for GPR data preprocessing for discrimination of shallowly buried landmines.

Electromagnetic wave scattering from a perfectly conducting indented body of revolution is analyzed both in the frequency and time domains. The three-dimensional (3-D) scattering process and the effect of polarization on scattering characteristics are revealed. A well-defined scattering matrix representation is adopted for investigating the polarimetric property of the 3-D scattering. First, the scattering cross sections are calculated in the frequency domain by using the Yasuura method (Mode-Matching Method) which is a powerful and reliable numerical method for solving electromagnetic boundary value problems. Next, co-polarization and cross-polarization components of the pulse response waveforms are calculated from the scattering matrix by using the Fourier synthesis technique. It is found out from the numerical results that the pulse responses from the indented objects can be interpreted as three distinctive waves: conventional specularly-reflected wave, creeping wave and complex specularly-reflected wave which is reflected from a complex specular reflection point. These scattering processes are consistently explained by employing the extended ray theory. And the radar polarimetries of these three distinctive waves are clearly observed both in co-polarization and cross-polarization components of scattering cross sections and pulse responses.

An efficient optical power splitter constructed by a metal-dielectric-metal plasmonic waveguide with a resonator structure has been analyzed. The method of solution is the finite difference time domain (FD-TD) method with the piecewise linear recursive convolution (PLRC) method. The resonator structure consists of input/output waveguides and a narrow waveguide with a T-junction. The power splitter with the resonator structure is expressed by an equivalent transmission-line circuit. We can find that the transmittance and reflectance calculated by the FD-TD method and the equivalent circuit are matched when the difference in width between the input/output waveguides and the narrow waveguide is small. It is also shown that the transmission wavelength can be adjusted by changing the narrow waveguide lengths that satisfy the impedance matching condition in the equivalent circuit.

A method of calibration for GPR responses is introduced in order to extract a target response from GPR data. This calibration procedure eliminates undesirable waveform distortion that is caused by antenna characteristics and multiple scattering effects between the antennas and the ground surface. An application result to measured GPR data shows that undesirable late-time responses caused by the antenna characteristics and multiple scattering effects are removed, and that the target response is clearly reconstructed. This result demonstrates that the waveform calibration of GPR data is significant and essential for reliable target identification.

This brief paper proposes a method for calibration of GPR pulse waveforms that is effective for identification of buried objects in the ground and/or in concrete structures. This approach is based on the inverse filtering operation that eliminates the influence of GPR antenna characteristics, and a response from a flat metal plate is employed as a reference data for calibration. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, it is applied to actual experimental data measured by the UWB-GPR antennas. The results show the validity of the method and importance of the waveform calibration for target identification.

We present a finite-difference time-domain (FD-TD) method with the perfectly matched layers (PMLs) absorbing boundary condition (ABC) based on the multidimensional wave digital filters (MD-WDFs) for discrete-time modelling of Maxwell's equations and show its effectiveness. First we propose modified forms of the Maxwell's equations in the PMLs and its MD-WDFs' representation by using the current-controlled voltage sources. In order to estimate the lower bound of numerical errors which come from the discretization of the Maxwell's equations, we examine the numerical dispersion relation and show the advantage of the FD-TD method based on the MD-WDFs over the Yee algorithm. Simultaneously, we estimate numerical errors in practical problems as a function of grid cell size and show that the MD-WDFs can obtain highly accurate numerical solutions in comparison with the Yee algorithm. Then we analyze several typical dielectric optical waveguide problems such as the tapered waveguide and the grating filter, and confirm that the FD-TD method based on the MD-WDFs can also treat radiation and reflection phenomena, which commonly done using the Yee algorithm.

A feature for classification of shallowly buried landmine-like objects using a ground penetrating radar (GPR) measurement system is proposed and its performance is evaluated. The feature for classification employed here is a time interval between two pulses reflected from top and bottom sides of landmine-like objects. First, we estimate a time resolution required to detect object thickness from GPR data, and check the actual time resolution through laboratory experiment. Next, we evaluate the classification performance using Monte Carlo simulations from dataset generated by a two-dimensional finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The results show that good classification performance is achieved even for landmine-like objects buried at shallow depths under rough ground surfaces. Furthermore, we also estimate the effects of ground surface roughness, soil inhomogeneity, and target inclination on the classification performance.

Scattering of plane electromagnetic wave by a semi-infinite strip grating has been analyzed under the assumption that the strip is narrow relative to the wavelength. Numerical results are given for some diffraction patterns.

Matching Pursuits (MP), a technique for signal decomposition using a dictionary of functions, is applied to ground penetrating radar (GPR) signals in order to remove noise and clutter included in the signals and to extract target responses. A wave-based dictionary composed of wavefronts and resonances is employed. Noise reduction performance and the removal of ground-surface reflection are evaluated through numerical simulations. The results show that the MP approach performs well and offers an effective method for feature extraction from GPR signals.

Scattering responses from a dielectric sphere are analyzed in the time-frequency domain by using two types of wavelet transform in order to reveal the scattering mechanisms. In the resulting time-frequency displays, various scattering processes including reflection, refraction, and diffraction can be clearly resolved and identified. The delay time of each scattering process agrees well with that obtained by the ray theory. Furthermore, the natural frequencies that are not easy to extract by the conventional Fourier analysis can be extracted.

A simple numerical method for calculating paths of creeping rays around an arbitrary convex object is presented. The adventage of this method is that the path of creeping ray is iteratively determined from initial values of incident point and incident direction of the creeping ray without solving differential equation of geodesic path. As the numerical examples, the path of creeping ray on the prolate spheroid and the resonance path of natural modes are shown.

This paper describes a parametric representation of ultra-wideband radar signatures and its physical interpretation. Under the scattering theory of electromagnetic waves, a transfer function of radar scattering is factorized into three elementary parts and a radar signature with three parameters is derived. To use these parameters for radar target classification and identification, the relation between them and the response waveform is analytically revealed and numerically checked. The result indicates that distortion of the response waveform is sensitive to these parameters, and thus they can be expected to be used as features for radar target classification and identification.

Identification of targets using sequential high range-resolution (HRR) radar signatures is studied. Classifiers are designed by using hidden Markov models (HMMs) to characterize the sequential information in multi-aspect HRR signatures. The higher-order moments together with the target dimension and the number of dominant wavefronts are used as features of the transient HRR waveforms. Classification results are presented for the ten-target MSTAR data set. The example results show that good classification performance and robustness are obtained, although the target features used here are very simple and compact compared with the complex HRR signatures.