Time-frequency analysis for plastic landmine detection via forward-looking ground penetrating radar

Time-frequency analysis techniques are used for buried plastic landmine detection with a forward-looking ground penetration radar (GPR) system. Several time-frequency distributions are considered to characterise and interpret the scattering phenomena of both targets and clutter. An ambiguity function based detector is also presented, which employs principal component analysis and feature selection for data dimensionality reduction and linear discriminant analysis for signal classification. Experimental results based on the SRI (Stanford Research Institute) experimentally measured forward-looking GPR data are presented, showing a significant detection performance improvement over the conventional detector.