Landmine bistatic scattering function estimation from virtual aperture radar image

Virtual aperture formed by multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array can obtain the high-resolution image, which contains bistatic scattering information instead of monostatic scattering information and thus can improve the discrimination performance of virtual aperture radar. In this paper, a bistatic scattering function estimation method is proposed to extract the landmine bistatic scattering information from the forward-looking virtual aperture ground penetrating radar image. The imaging model of virtual aperture is developed firstly. Based on the imaging model, the bistatic scattering function of a suspected object is estimated on the virtual aperture image of the suspected object using the space-wavenumber processing. The experimental results show that the proposed method can offer the bistatic scattering information to discriminate landmines from clutter.