The generalized SEA and a statistical signal processing approach applied to UXO discrimination

The prohibitive costs of excavating all geophysical anomalies are well known and are one of the greatest impediments to efficient clean-up of unexploded ordnance (UXO)-contaminated lands at Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Energy (DOE) sites. Innovative discrimination techniques that can reliably distinguish between hazardous UXO and non-hazardous metallic items are required. The key element to overcoming these difficulties lies in the development of advanced processing techniques that can treat complex data sets to maximize the probability of accurate classification and minimize the false alarm rate. To address these issues, this paper uses a new approach that combines a physically complete EMI forward model called the Generalized Standardized Excitation Approach (GSEA) with a statistical signal processing approach named Mixed Modeling (MM). UXO discrimination requires the inversion of digital geophysical data, which could be divided into two pars: 1) linear - estimating model parameters such as the amplitudes of the responding GSEA sources and 2) non-linear - inverting an object's location and orientation. Usually the data inversion is an ill-posed problem that requires regularization. Determining the regularization parameter is not straightforward, and in many cases depends on personal experience. To overcome this issue, in this paper we employ the statistical approach to estimate regularization parameters from actual data using the un-surprised mixed model approach. In addition, once the non-linear inverse scattering parameters are estimated then for UXO discrimination a covariance matrix and confidence interval are derived. The theoretical basis and practical realization of the combined GSEA-Mixed Model algorithm are demonstrated. Discrimination studies are done for ATC-UXO sets of time-domain EMI data collected at the ERDC UXO test stand site in Vicksburg, Mississippi.