Improving landmine detection using frequency domain features from ground penetrating radar

Landmine detection is an important and yet challenging problem remains to be solved. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is an effective sensor to detect landmines that are made of plastic or have low metal content. Most GPR signal processing algorithms apply processing in the time (depth) domain. This work proposes to use the frequency domain features from the GPR signal to improve the detection of weak plastic mines and to reduce the number false alarms due to clutter objects. The motivation comes from the fact that the energy density spectrum may be different between mine targets and clutter objects, although both may have strong GPR signal return in the time domain. Experimental results based on clutter lane data collected at a test site corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed spectral features to increase the accuracy for landmine detection.