Comparative Analysis of Short and Long GPR Pulses for Landmine Detection

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is one of the most popular subsurface sensing devices. It has a wide range of applications such as landmine detection, archeological investigations, road condition survey and so on. Hardware and software requirements of the GPR system are strongly dependent on type of applications. Principally, lower frequencies provide deeper penetration and low resolution, but higher frequencies are able to detect shallow objects with high resolution. As a fundamental design criterion, there is a trade-off between penetration depth and vertical resolution. In impulse radar, pulse duration (frequency related) is a key parameter because it affects the system detection performance. Specially, optimization of the pulse duration is a challenging problem for landmine detection because the GPR performance has been strongly affected from mine types, varying terrain and environmental conditions. In this work, two GPR systems with pulse durations of 650 ps and 870 ps are compared for evaluation of their detection performance. The pulses are tested with extensive data sets collected from different soil types by using surrogate mines and other objects. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves of the system is also calculated. It seems that the 650 ps pulse duration gives better performance than the 870 ps pulse duration for the shallow landmine detection.