Objectives To mitigate the negative effects of coating radar absorbing materials on ships, such as a shift in the center of gravity, increased cost and higher maintenance workload, a multi-objective optimization design strategy based on radar echo feature development technology is proposed. This approach aims to identify the key coating areas on both the ship and its equipment.

Method  The proposed optimization strategy is applied to radar imaging analysis of a ship to optimize its Radar Cross Section (RCS) and coating area. Pareto and non-pareto solution sets are generated, and engineering application scenarios are inferred through inverse modeling.

Results  The results show that the proposed method can accurately determine the key coating areas. Simulations yielded at least 10 pareto optimal solutions, including bipolar solutions. When applying inverse engineering based on the pareto solution, the ship’s total average RCS decreases by more than 53% with a coating area ration of less than 11%.

Conclusion Simulation results show that the proposed method is effective and offers significant engineering value for RCS control of ship targets.