Detection of Buried Nonlinear Targets Using DORT

Abstract

Ground-penetrating radars (GPR) based on a variety of techniques have been proposed to improve the performance of buried target (e.g., landmines, threat devices) detection. However, the small radar cross section (RCS) of small electronic devices poses difficulties for target detection, especially when they are buried in lossy and inhomogeneous media. This paper presents a novel buried nonlinear target detection method based on the decomposition of the time-reversal operator (DORT) that uses a multistatic system to overcome the limitations of conventional GPR. Using harmonic radar, which detects the harmonic responses scattered from electronic devices, and DORT processing, which enables focusing/imaging of the detected target, the detection performance is verified by conducting simulation and measurements. The overall results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves accurate detection of buried targets with small RCS.