Refraction and Dispersion Effects Compensation for UWB SAR Subsurface Object Imaging

It is a trend to use airborne or vehicle-borne ultrawideband synthetic aperture radar (UWB SAR) to quickly detect subsurface objects, i.e., landmines or minefields, over large areas from a safe standoff distance. The traditional image formations without considering the refraction and dispersion of electromagnetic wave will lead to locating error and defocusing for subsurface objects. In this paper, an efficient refraction and dispersion effects compensation method is proposed, which can be integrated with the traditional three-stage automatic target detection framework for detection of subsurface landmines. The compensation method can focus and correctly locate multiple objects buried in different soils with different depths over large areas, which satisfies the operating requirement of an airborne or vehicle-borne UWB SAR system. The proposed method is proved efficient for subsurface object imaging by the field data collected by a UWB SAR system.