Investigation of Time-Frequency Features for GPR Landmine Discrimination

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is capable to detect plastic antipersonnel landmines as well as other subsurface targets. In order to reduce false alarms, an option of automatic landmine discrimination from neutral minelike targets would be very useful. This paper presents a possibility for such discrimination and analyzes it experimentally. The authors investigate time–frequency features of an ultrawideband (UWB) target response for the discrimination between buried landmines and other objects. The discrimination method includes the extraction of an early-time target impulse response, its time–frequency transformation, and the extraction of time–frequency features based on a singular value decomposition of the transformed image. In order to take into account the changes in the UWB target signals, the experimental conditions are completely controlled to focus on the behavior of the target’s response with respect to its depth and the horizontal position of the GPR above it. The dependence of the features on the GPR bandwidth is analyzed as well. The Mahalanobis distance is used as a criterion for optimal discrimination. The obtained results define the best features and conditions when the landmine discrimination is successful. For comparison, the discriminant power of the proposed features has been tested on a dataset, acquired during a field campaign in Angola.