An Initial Value Estimation Method for the Kalman and Extended Kalman Filters in Underground Metal Detection

As an underground metal detection technology, the electromagnetic induction (EMI) method is widely used in many cases. Therefore, the EMI detection algorithms with excellent performance are worth studying. One of the EMI detection methods in the underground metal detection is the filter method, which first obtains the secondary magnetic field data and then uses the Kalman filter (KF) and the extended Kalman filter (EKF) to estimate the parameters of metal targets. However, the traditional KF methods used in the underground metal detection have an unsatisfactory performance of the convergence as the algorithms are given a random or a fixed initial value. Here, an initial state estimation algorithm for the underground metal detection is proposed. The initial state of the target’s horizontal position is estimated by the first order central moments of the secondary field strength map. In addition, the initial state of the target’s depth is estimated by the full width at half maximum (FWHM) method. In addition, the initial state of the magnetic polarizability tensor is estimated by the least squares method. Then, these initial states are used as the initial values for KF and EKF. Finally, the position, posture and polarizability of the target are recursively calculated. A simulation platform for the underground metal detection is built in this paper. The simulation results show that the initial value estimation method proposed for the filtering algorithm has an excellent performance in the underground metal detection.