Real-Time Vehicle-Mounted Multistatic Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging System for Buried Object Detection

Technical Report · Tue Jan 15 04:00:00 EST 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1068301· OSTI ID:1068301

Chambers, David H. ^[1]; Paglieroni, David W. ^[1]; Mast, Jeffrey E. ^[1]; Beer, N. Reginald ^[1]

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1. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

A multistatic ground penetrating radar system is described, capable of real-time imaging and object detection. The radar consists of 16 transmitter and receiver pairs mounted across the front of a vehicle. The transmitters operate sequentially with all receivers activated for each transmit pulse. The resulting frame of 256 multistatic time signals is processed into an image using a tomographic reconstruction technique. In this paper we describe the system architecture, signal conditioning, and reconstruction algorithm for producing a sequence of images in real time as the vehicle travels across the ground. We demonstrate a robust image post-processing method that separates the bright spot corresponding to the dominant buried object in an image frame from the background. This is essential before calculating an energy-based statistic for automatic detection of buried objects. This spot ratio detection statistic, based on energy both inside and outside the spot, is shown to be not only more stationary than spot energy (i.e. mostly free of localized trends due to changing ground conditions), but also more powerful as a detection statistic. Finally, we demonstrate that multistatic imaging significantly improves the detection performance over more conventional monostatic array processing.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-48
• OSTI ID: 1068301
• Report Number(s): LLNL-TR--615452
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

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GENERAL PHYSICS