Alternating-sign windowed energy projection of SAR focused GPR data

The automated detection of plastic-cased antipersonnel landmines in 3D high-resolution UWB radar images is considered. The 3D images are projected in different ways onto 2D confidence maps, in which the automated APM detection is made by marking local maxima in the maps followed by thresholding. Specifically, we consider the confidence maps of the following types: energy projection (EP), windowed energy projection (WEP) and introduced here alternating sign windowed energy projection (ASWEP). The latter is shown to allow diminishing of the false alarms number in comparison for the other two techniques for most of the considered cases. The advantages of the new technique are described by means of receiver operator curves (ROC). The ROC curves are built for the datasets acquired over several minefield simulation sites under different environmental conditions.