Land mine detection with an ultra-wideband SAR system

PULSAR is an Ultra Wide Band (UWB) short pulse Radar developed by the CELAR (French Technical Center for Armament Electronics) and the IRCOM (Research Institute of Microwave and Optical Communications) in order to detect foliage and ground concealed mines. An instrumentation measurement system has been designed and implemented, in particular new 2D broad band antennas with a very low pulse distortion. The clutter suppression is based on background subtraction and wavelet transforms. These data are used to obtain SAR ultra wide band images by transient methods. The following discussion describes the device, the experimental results and the signal processing currently utilized. Future development efforts on this system (generator, acquisition means .) are detailed. At the same time a theoretical study is made to estimate target transient responses captured by the system. So a FDTD code is modified to simulate buried objects detection by the radar.