Ground penetrating radar measurements: Applications to synthetic data generation and target characterization

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is widely studied for detection of landmines and mine-like targets; GPR is particularly useful for detecting minimum metal mines which are harder to detect using traditional metal detection devices alone. In order to expand the phenomenology for GPR, careful measurements of homogeneous and heterogeneous soils with and without targets (landmine simulants and metal objects) are performed in a controlled environment. These measurements will aid in the development of models for soil response beyond the initial air-ground interface. Such explicit models for soil will increase the effectiveness of algorithms designed to discriminate between returns from targets and from naturally occurring geologic materials and interfaces. Furthermore, careful measurement of soil characteristics will enable comparison and refinement of models of soil with embedded targets developed in electromagnetic simulations (using finite-difference time-domain codes (FDTD), e.g.).