Ground surface scattering and clutter suppression in ground-penetrating radar applications

A scattering and imaging, clutter characterization and suppression study is carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of sensing buried targets in a terrain environment with a rough ground surface. The investigation is pertinent to detection performance analysis and prediction for a vehicle-based, ultra-wideband, ground-penetrating radar system. In the electromagnetic domain, the scattering response of the terrain scene is computed with a parallelized finite-difference time-domain solver; subsequent multistatic image formation is obtained with a time-reversal based approach. In the image domain, the distribution of the ground clutter is analyzed, and a statistical polarimetric clutter reduction method is applied to improve the signal-to-background ratio.