ABSTRACT This study proposes to extend and refine the methodology of Gaussian beam summation (GBS) for computing the radar cross section (RCS) of dielectric targets in both monostatic and bistatic cases. Furthermore, the generalisation to the bistatic case is shown to be equivalent to phase steering. Indeed, we leverage a semi‐analytical GBS technique, inspired by optical physics. We compute the RCS by discretising the target, such as with rectangles or triangles, and then summing the contributions of these discrete elements, for which the expansion coefficients (or weight function) have already been computed. This allows, first, to relax the far‐field criteria to the scale of the discretised elements and, second, to facilitate the computation of the RCS of more complicated targets. Furthermore, dielectrics are accounted for using the Fresnel coefficient. Numerical tests and applications in the S and X bands are also provided to validate the method by comparing it to analytic RCS formula and highlight its advantages. We also propose to study the case where the dielectric parameters of the target are not perfectly known.
Bonnafont et al. (Thu,) studied this question.