Feature Extraction and Discriminator Design for Landmine Detection on Double-Hump Signature in Ultrawideband SAR

An air- or vehicleborne ultrawideband synthetic aperture radar (UWB SAR) has ground penetrating capability, which provides a sufficient approach to detect landmines over wide areas from a safe standoff distance. In this paper, a support vector machine (SVM) with hypersphere classification boundary, which is referred to as HyperSphere-SVM (HS-SVM), using a hidden Markov model (HMM) kernel on the feature vector extracted by a postfilter-based method is proposed for landmine detection. The postfilter-based method can extract the feature containing not only the amplitude but also the amplitude varying information of the double-hump signature of metallic and plastic landmines. Compared with simple kernels, e.g., the Gaussian kernel, the HMM kernel employs the state-transition information in the extracted feature into the discrimination procedure and, thus, can improve detection performance. The proposed postfilter-based feature extraction method and the HMM kernel HS-SVM are verified on the field data collected by a UWB SAR system in different scenarios.