General Purpose Radar Simulator based on Blender Cycles Path Tracer

This paper proposes a general-purpose radar simulation tool based on the path tracer Cycles used in Blender, an open-source 3D computer graphics software. The scenarios, object's geometry, and materials can be defined within Blender. The propagation of waves in the scenery is simulated by the Cycles renderer, so that a second computational tool, such as Matlab or Octave, can be used for reconstructing the received signal. A simulated experiment using the proposed tool is presented. The results indicate that the tool has a great potential to be used in a variety of radar applications, including cross-section measurement, simulated radar data generation, and simulated synthetic aperture radar imaging.