Progress in the Research of Ground Bounce Removal for Landmine Detection with Ground Penetrating Radar

Abstract

Downward looking ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been considered a viable technology for landmine detection. For such a GPR with the antennas positioned very close to the ground surface, the reflections from the ground surface, i.e., the ground bounce, are very strong and can completely dominate the weak returns from shallowly buried plastic mines. Hence, one of the key challenges of using GPRs for landmine detection is to remove the ground bounce as completely as possible without altering the landmine return. In this paper, we first review existing ground bounce removal algorithms. Then two newly devised adaptive ground bounce removal algorithms, ASaS (Adaptive Shifted and Scaled algorithm) and RLP (Robust Linear Prediction) will be presented. Both ASaS and RLP are based on a flexible data model applicable to rough ground surface and an effective generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) based non-homogeneous detector is devised to further improve their performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are more robust than conventional ground bounce removal algorithms.