Present state of the art in ground-penetrating radars for mine detection

Abstract

The U.S. Army has under development a number of systems to detect buried metallic and nonmetallic land mines. Almost all of these systems include a ground penetrating radar (GPR). These systems may be handheld or vehicle mounted and may be designed for close in or for standoff detection. A consensus has not been reached regarding many important system parameters. A discussion of the tradeoffs involving waveform, frequency, bandwidth, downlook angle, scanning methods, polarization, and spatial resolution will be presented. The usefulness of special techniques such as target resonances, synthetic aperture, and multiple polarizations will be discussed. The potential of GPR will be compared with competing sensors. A brief overview of a diverse set of GPR sensors will be presented.