Kd-tree based fast ray tracing for RCS prediction

Ray tracing is of great use for computational electromagnetics, such as the well-known shooting and bouncing ray (SBR) method. In this paper, the kd-tree data structure, coupled with the mailbox technique, is proposed to accelerate the ray tracing in the SBR. The kd-tree is highly effective in handling the irregularly distribution of patches of the target, while the repeatedly intersection tests between the ray and the patch when using space division acceleration structures can be eliminated through the mailbox technique. Numerical results show excellent agreement with the measured data and the exact solution, and demonstrate that the kd-tree as well as the mailbox technique can greatly reduce the computation time.