Comparison of algorithms for finding the air-ground interface in ground penetrating radar signals

In using GPR images for landmine detection it is often useful to identify the air-ground interface in the GPR signal for alignment purposes. A number of algorithms have been proposed to solve the air-ground interface detection problem, including some which use only A-scan data, and others which track the ground in B-scans or C-scans. Here we develop a framework for comparing these algorithms relative to one another and we examine the results. The evaluations are performed on data that have been categorized in terms of features that make the air-ground interface difficult to find or track. The data also have associated human selected ground locations, from multiple evaluators, that can be used for determining correctness. A distribution is placed over each of the human selected ground locations, with the sum of these distributions at the algorithm selected location used as a measure of its correctness. Algorithms are also evaluated in terms of how they affect the false alarm and true positive rates of mine detection algorithms that use ground aligned data.