A Multiple Migration and Stacking Algorithm Designed for Land Mine Detection

This paper describes a modification to a standard migration algorithm for land mine detection with a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) system. High directivity from the antenna requires a significantly large aperture in relation to the operating wavelength, but at the frequencies of operation of GPR, this would result in a large and impractical antenna. For operator convenience, most GPR antennas are small and exhibit low directivity and a wide beamwidth. This causes the GPR image to bear little resemblance to the actual target scattering centers. Migration algorithms attempt to reduce this effect by focusing the scattered energy from the source reflector and consequentially improve the target detection rate. However, problems occur due to the varying operational conditions, which result in the migration algorithm requiring vastly different calibration parameters. In order to combat this effect, this migration scheme stacks multiple versions of the same migrated data with different velocity values, whereas some other migration schemes only use a single velocity value.