Multi-perspective high range resolution profiles of landmines

Landmine clearance is a severe and unresolved humanitarian issue. The development of low-cost, smaller, faster and lighter Ground Penetrating Radars (GPR), which can be mounted on unmanned platforms, will allow faster and safer 24/7 operations. This technology will make it possible to survey affected areas with more flexible trajectories and these will provide measurements of landmine signatures from many different aspect angles. As a result, multi-perspective information over wide angular windows and the behaviour of the signature as a function of the angle of illumination can be exploited. Landmine signatures are expected to present features that are less sensitive to the angle of illumination with respect to those of common cluttered objects, and this can lead to an improvement in detection and discrimination performance. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental trial carried out to collect the High Range Resolution Profiles (HRRPs) of two landmines, the SB-33 and the VS-50, off the ground. An analysis of the auto-correlation function of each range bin as a function of the aspect angle is presented together with that of the cross-correlation between profiles collected from different aspect angles.