3D ground adaptive synthetic aperture radar for landmine detection

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm which shows a buried landmine clearly in an underground image captured by a ground penetrating radar (GPR). By using GPR, we could extract the buried object signals from a raw underground data of GPR. In addition, we could create a high resolution underground image which focuses on buried objects. The extraction of buried object signals from raw GPR data is achieved by using two methods which are a feature extraction processing method of underground image and a ground adaptive manipulation method which manipulates the sensor head of GPR along a ground surface. Moreover, we propose novel synthetic aperture radar processing, which could be applied to an uneven ground surface of a minefield, for detecting the landmine clearly. The high resolution underground image is obtained by the proposed synthetic aperture radar processing which is referred to as ground adaptive synthetic aperture radar algorithm. We developed a landmine detection robot, in which the proposed methods were implemented. To evaluate the proposed methods, experiments concerning landmine detection are done and experimental results illustrate the validity of the system.