Detection of Landmines Using Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (NQR): Signal Processing to Aid Classification

Nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) is a sensor technology that measures a signature unique to the explosive contained in the mine, thus providing a means of efficiently detecting landmines. Unfortunately, the measured signals are inherently weak and therefore detection times are currently too long (especially for TNT-based landmines) to implement in a man-portable detection system. However, the NQR hardware is light enough to be integrated into a robot based system. This paper investigates several power spectrum estimation algorithms applied to NQR signals in order to distinguish between data containing signals from explosive and data that does not.