Threshold based algorithms for UXO detection using magnetometry

Iron buried objects induce anomalies in the earth´s magnetic field that appear on the surface below items and that can be measured by a magnetometer. In this work, two approaches already used in radar detection are introduced and modified to improve the UXO detection. The measurement noises, the weak value of the earth´s magnetic field and the variations due to the soil heterogeneity increase the false alarm probability. In order to reduce this last, we introduce a cell-averaging-based threshold algorithm used in radar detection. It consists of doing a comparison between each measure and a weighted average of the neighbor measures. The proposed algorithm is validated using simulation data and promising results have been obtained.