Buried Object Detection from B-Scan Ground Penetrating Radar Data Using Faster-RCNN

In this paper, we adapt the Faster-RCNN framework for the detection of underground buried objects (i.e. hyperbola reflections) in B-scan ground penetrating radar (GPR) images. Due to the lack of real data for training, we propose to incorporate more simulated radargrams generated from different configurations using the gprMax toolbox. Our designed CNN is first pre-trained on the grayscale Cifar-l0 database. Then, the Faster-RCNN framework based on the pre-trained CNN is trained and fine-tuned on both real and simulated GPR data. Preliminary detection results show that the proposed technique can provide significant improvements compared to classical computer vision methods and hence becomes quite promising to deal with this kind of specific GPR data even with few training samples.

[1]  Craig Warren,et al.  gprMax: Open source software to simulate electromagnetic wave propagation for Ground Penetrating Radar , 2016, Comput. Phys. Commun..

[2]  Colin G. Windsor,et al.  A Data Pair-Labeled Generalized Hough Transform for Radar Location of Buried Objects , 2014, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[3]  Paolo Bestagini,et al.  Landmine detection from GPR data using convolutional neural networks , 2017, 2017 25th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO).

[4]  Jörg Schmalzl,et al.  Using pattern recognition to automatically localize reflection hyperbolas in data from ground penetrating radar , 2013, Comput. Geosci..

[5]  Jean-Marie Nicolas,et al.  Automatic localization of gas pipes from GPR imagery , 2016, 2016 24th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO).

[6]  Lance E. Besaw,et al.  Deep convolutional neural networks for classifying GPR B-scans , 2015, Defense + Security Symposium.

[7]  Kaiming He,et al.  Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[8]  Jordan M. Malof,et al.  Some good practices for applying convolutional neural networks to buried threat detection in Ground Penetrating Radar , 2017, 2017 9th International Workshop on Advanced Ground Penetrating Radar (IWAGPR).

[9]  Jin Chen,et al.  Tree Root Automatic Recognition in Ground Penetrating Radar Profiles Based on Randomized Hough Transform , 2016, Remote. Sens..

[10]  Leslie M. Collins,et al.  Histograms of Oriented Gradients for Landmine Detection in Ground-Penetrating Radar Data , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[11]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2001.

[12]  Jean-Philippe Tarel,et al.  Template-matching based detection of hyperbolas in ground-penetrating radargrams for buried utilities , 2016 .