A linear prediction land mine detection algorithm for hand held ground penetrating radar

Land mine detection using ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a difficult task because the background clutter characteristics are nonstationary and the land mine signatures are inconsistent. A particularly difficult scenario is the case for which a GPR is mounted on a hand held device with no position or velocity information available to a signal processing algorithm. This paper proposes the use of linear prediction in the frequency domain for land mine detection in this scenario. A frequency domain clutter vector sample is partitioned into subbands. Each subband is modeled by a linear prediction model; the current vector sample is expressed as a linear combination of the past few vector samples plus random noise. The detector first computes the maximum likelihood estimate of the prediction coefficients, and then uses the generalized likelihood method to determine if a land mine is present. The effect of subband processing on the accuracy of the detector is evaluated. Detection results are presented on data collected from a variety of geographical locations. The data sets contain over 2300 mine encounters of different size, shape and content, and a larger number of measurements from locations with no mines. The proposed detector is compared to the baseline differential energy detector. The proposed algorithm reduces the false alarm rate by 60% for all the targets at 90% probability of detection, and 70% for the deep anti-tank mines at 90% probability of detection.