Short-pulse response of antipersonnel landmines to UWB GPR signals

摘要

In the frame of the Belgian interuniversity project HUDEM (HUmanitarian DEMining), the Royal Military Academy (RMA) has started a research on the detection of landmines by means of ultra-wideband ground penetrating radar (UWB GPR) using short pulses (<200ps). Because AP mines are buried not deeper than 20 centimetres and are very small objects (volume <0,2 dm~3), conventional GPR is not very well suited to detect all the mines without failure, especially shallow mines. Besides, the discrimination between mines and minelike targets is quite difficult without a large effort in signal processing. These two problems can be overcome by using a pulse duration as short as 200 ps which yields a better spatial resolution on the target and provides a good separation intime between the echo from the airground interface and the echo from the mine.