Surface effects on ground penetrating radar imagery

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is emerging as viable technology for rapid and accurate landmine detection. Although GPR has been successfully used for land mine and subsurface object detection, the performance of GPR is affected by surface roughness of the soil medium. There have been theoretical studies showing that surface roughness degrades GPR performance, but few empirical studies have been performed. In this paper, we report on an empirical study of the effect of rough, flattened, and smooth surfaces on GPR images of an easily understood target.