Detection of shallowly buried objects using impulse radar

The impulse radar has shown promising results for detecting buried objects, even nonmetallic ones. One problem with ground penetrating radars is the strong backscattered signal from the ground surface. If the object is buried deeply below the surface this is no problem since the backscattered signal from the surface will arrive earlier than the target signal and we only have to gate the time signal. When the objects are shallowly buried gating is not possible since the backscattered signal from target and the surface will arrive almost simultaneously. The detection problem is thus to a large extent the problem of separating the target signal from the ground backscatter. In the present paper, the authors introduce a signal model that exploits the different properties of the backscattered signals from target and ground surface. Different algorithms for separation of the different components in the signal model are presented together with a performance measure to evaluate the algorithms. After the signal components have been separated, both classical detection methods and some more ad hoc methods are applied and evaluated.