Buried target signature extraction from ground penetrating radar signal based on the equivalence principle

Abstract

Ground penetrating radar is poised to be a very valuable tool in the field of humanitarian demining. Recently a monostatic stepped-frequency continuous wave (SFCW) ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been developed for the characterization of the soil electromagnetic (EM) parameters epsi (dielectric permittivity), mu (magnetic permeability) and sigma (electric conductivity). The approach is extended here for the GPR signal extraction of buried targets. The equivalence principle is used to decompose the GPR signal in its soil and target-in-soil contributions. It permits the subtraction of the soil contribution from the total GPR signal, which provides the signature of the buried target. We have extracted clean frequency and time-domain signatures of a metallic sphere and a PMIN-2 plastic mine embedded in a multilayered medium at various moisture levels. The GPR signal of the metallic sphere has been simulated using the method of moments and shows good agreement with its measured counterpart.Anglai