Monte Carlo simulations for clutter statistics in minefields: AP-mine-like-target buried near a dielectric object beneath 2-D random rough ground surfaces

A rigorous three-dimensional (3-D) electromagnetic model is developed to analyze the scattering from anti-personnel (AP) nonmetallic mine-like target when it is buried near a clutter object under two-dimensional (2-D) random rough surfaces. The steepest descent fast multipole method (SDFMM) is implemented to solve for the unknown electric and magnetic surface currents on the ground surface, on the target and on the clutter object. A comprehensive numerical investigation of two clutter sources; the ground roughness and the nearby benign object, is presented based on using more than 800 random rough surface realizations which could not be achieved without using fast algorithms such as the SDFMM. The statistics of the scattered near-electric fields are computed using the Monte Carlo simulations for both polarizations. For the parameters used here, the results show that the average and the standard deviation of the target signature represent 5-7% and 3-3.5% of the total scattered signal, respectively, while they represent 16-20% and 7-12% of the signal for the clutter object, respectively. This study indicates the high possibility of a false alarm during the detection process when the target is located nearby a realistic object such as a piece of a tree root.