Landmine detection using forward-looking GPR with object tracking

Abstract

There has been significant amount of study on the use of Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) for forward-looking landmine detection. This paper presents our analysis of GPR data collected at a U.S. Army site using the radar system developed by Planning Systems Inc. (PSI). One property of forward-looking systems is that a target appears in multiple radar images at different distances. To exploit this property, we divide the distance range in the radar images into a number of distance bands. Identification of potential targets is first performed in each distance band independently. Our algorithm then tracks these potential targets through multiple distance bands and computes weighted averages of their geometrical features. The persistence property of the targets is used to further reduce false alarm rates by removing potential targets that only appear spuriously. Results of landmine detection, including performance on blind test lanes, are presented.