Detection of Corrosion under Aircraft Paints and Appliques Using Microwave NDE

An automatic, high fidelity, wide area, multi-spectral scenegeneration capability incorporating the advanced VTRPEpropagation code is proposed for radar system applications. Theproposed physics-based approach employs material and featuretyping at the individual pixel level to produce RCS maps, whichcan be used in both monostatic and bistatic applications. Thesoon-to-be commercially available EarthScape3D, an automated geo-specific scene database generator developed jointly by PRA andEvans and Sutherland(E&S), is proposed to be the backbone of theautomated system. The scenes are deterministic and geo-specific,enabling radar sensor simulations in real-world conditions to beconducted. The major benefit of the underlying physics-basedapproach is that the common scene databases support multiplesensors operating at different frequencies, and that reflectivitycharacteristics from the scene can be rapidly recomputed as eachsensor platform moves relative to the scene. The proposed effortencompasses wide area scene generation, high-resolution scenemodeling, and synthetic target seeding. Sensor/scene interfacescan provide inputs to radar sensor models with modeling in thefrequency domain (spectral representation) and in the time domain(coherent I, Q pulse generation). The scene generation softwarewill be based on a CORBA-component model (CCM) to facilitateupgrades,integration with EarthScape3D, and interoperability withvarious mission models to support U.S. Navy operational andinvestment strategies.