Investigation of side looking EM field scattering from a buried metallic object to support UXO discrimination

Detection and identification of buried unexploded ordinance (UXO) remains a challenging problem. Despite limitations due to clutter and ground coupling, ground penetrating radar has shown considerable virtues for UXO discrimination. Recent UWB field tests between 10's of MHz and 100's of MHz have demonstrated that certain of the target's dimensions can be estimated from analysis of complex natural resonances in the signal. The problem becomes much more complicated when objects are placed in layered ground and oriented vertical to the antenna, so the incident field cannot excite currents along the major axes and the scattered field from the object cannot easily be separated from the layer interface response. To investigate this, we pursue simulations here designed to test side looking EM field scattering from a buried object placed in layered ground. The numerical calculation is done using the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method in conjunction with the generalized perfectly matched layer GPML. The results are analyzed for a cylinder placed in a uniform and layered earth.