BVH-Accelerated Ray Tracing for High-Frequency Electromagnetic Backscattering

2026-04-10

AI Summary

This study addresses the high computational cost of full-wave electromagnetic solvers in high-frequency, electrically large scenarios by proposing an efficient pipeline based on the Shooting and Bouncing Rays (SBR) method. The approach integrates geometric optics for multiple reflections with physical optics surface integration to simulate backscattering from metallic targets. It innovatively employs a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) to accelerate ray–surface intersection tests and introduces an incident ray sampling criterion to mitigate phase aliasing in physical optics integrals, enabling accurate yet computationally efficient predictions. Leveraging GPU acceleration (NVIDIA/AMD) and MPI-based parallelization, the method demonstrates excellent agreement with Mie series solutions for a perfectly conducting sphere and successfully predicts monostatic radar cross sections for complex aircraft models.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications

Abstract

As computational complexity in electromagnetics increases with frequency, full-wave solvers become computationally infeasible for electrically large problems. To address this limitation, we present a shooting and bouncing rays (SBR) method for efficiently modeling electromagnetic backscattering of metallic objects in the high-frequency regime. The method couples multi-reflection geometrical-optics ray transport with a physical optics surface integral discretized over ray tubes. To reduce the massive ray-surface intersection search space, we use a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) and organize the computation as a trace-integrate pipeline. The ray tracing generates hit data, and the physical optics integral is evaluated over valid intersections only. Numerical accuracy is controlled through an incident-ray sampling rule that mitigates phase aliasing in the discretized physical optics integration. The method is accelerated on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and parallelized with MPI. We validate against analytical Mie solutions for a perfectly electrically conducting (PEC) sphere and demonstrate applicability to a complex aircraft geometry for monostatic radar cross-section prediction.

Problem

• high-frequency electromagnetic scattering
• electrically large problems
• computational complexity
• backscattering
• full-wave solvers

Innovation

• BVH-accelerated ray tracing
• shooting and bouncing rays (SBR)
• physical optics integration
• high-frequency electromagnetics
• GPU-MPI parallelization