Title :
Influence of Heterogeneous Soils and Clutter on the Performance of Ground-Penetrating Radar for Landmine Detection
Author :
Takahashi, Koichi ; Igel, J. ; Preetz, Holger ; Sato, Mitsuhisa
Author_Institution :
Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Tohoku Univ., Sendai, Japan
Abstract :
Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has been studied for landmine detection and identification. Since this application employs higher frequencies as compared to conventional largescale GPR measurements, the GPR performance is greatly influenced by soil properties and their spatial heterogeneity. In order to study the influence of soil heterogeneity on GPR performance, three types of soil were investigated. From the soil heterogeneity, GPR clutter was modeled with the aim of assessing the difficulty encountered in successful GPR performance. A handheld dual-sensor system that combines a metal detector and GPR was tested in these three test soils, and its performance for identifying buried objects was evaluated. The GPR performance obtained from the test showed a clear correlation with the modeled GPR clutter. Hence, the present study illustrates that clutter plays a major role in the detection of small objects in heterogeneous soil by GPR.
Keywords :
geophysical techniques; ground penetrating radar; landmine detection; radar clutter; sensor fusion; soil; GPR clutter; GPR performance; buried object identification; ground-penetrating radar performance; handheld dual-sensor system; heterogeneous soil; landmine detection; landmine identification; metal detector; small object detection; soil properties; spatial heterogeneity; Clutter; Detectors; Dielectrics; Ground penetrating radar; Metals; Permittivity; Soil; Clutter; dielectric permittivity; geostatistics; ground-penetrating radar (GPR); landmine detection; scattering; soil heterogeneity;
Journal_Title :
Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TGRS.2013.2273082
