Effect of pulse fidelity on detection of landmines

Abstract

Detection of landmines based on complex resonance frequencies has been studied in the past and no distinctive results have been reported. Especially for low metal content landmines buried at depths greater than 9 cm, resonant frequencies become fairly distributed in the background and no specific frequency of interest can be used. However, in a typical impulse radar, spectral energy density of the transmitted pulse can be very broad and its peak can be located anywhere. Usually, a compromise is made between penetration depth and feature resolution for spectral energy peak allocation. Pulse amplitude, duration, symmetry, its spectral energy distribution, ringing level all affect depth and resolution metrics in a complicated way. Considering receiver dynamic range, we study two distinct pulses having different spectral energy density peaks and their detection ability for landmines with little or no metallic content. We carry out experiments to show that pulse shape/fidelity is critical to obtain desired contrast in post-processing of data.