Scattering from a 2-D sea fractal surface: Fractal analysis of the scattered signal

This paper is the second part of the work presented in the June Issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION. We analytically demonstrate that the electromagnetic (EM) sea scattered signal retains certain fractal properties of the sea surface. Starting from the expression of the scattering coefficient derived in the first part of the work, we theoretically show that the fractal dimension of the in phase and quadrature components of the EM signal scattered from a sea fractal surface is linearly related to the fractal dimension of the sea surface. This result holds under the hypothesis of Kirchhoff approximation. Bearing in mind that the sea fractal dimension gives a measure of the irregularity degree of the surface, we can exploit this result to make a remote estimation of the roughness surface through the fractal analysis of the scattered signal. This is a very interesting result and it could be successfully used in remote sensing applications for classification, target detection, sea surface traffic monitoring, sea current analysis, oil slick and ship wakes recognition, pollution analysis, etc.