3D wavefront image formation for NIITEK GPR

The U.S. Department of Defense Humanitarian Demining (HD) Research and Development Program focuses on developing, testing, demonstrating, and validating new technology for immediate use in humanitarian demining operations around the globe. Beginning in the late 1990's, the U.S. Army Countermine Division funded the development of the NIITEK ground penetrating radar (GPR) for detection of anti-tank (AT) landmines. This work is concerned with signal processing algorithms to suppress sources of artifacts in the NIITEK GPR, and formation of three-dimensional (3D) imagery from the resultant data. We first show that the NIITEK GPR data correspond to a 3D Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) database. An adaptive filtering method is utilized to suppress ground return and self-induced resonance (SIR) signals that are generated by the interaction of the radar-carrying platform and the transmitted radar signal. We examine signal processing methods to improve the fidelity of imagery for this 3D SAR system using pre-processing methods that suppress Doppler aliasing as well as other side lobe leakage artifacts that are introduced by the radar radiation pattern. The algorithm, known as digital spotlighting, imposes a filtering scheme on the azimuth-compressed SAR data, and manipulates the resultant spectral data to achieve a higher PRF to suppress the Doppler aliasing. We also present the 3D version of the Fourier-based wavefront reconstruction, a computationally- efficient and approximation-free SAR imaging method, for image formation with the NIITEK 3D SAR database.