Ground response tracking for improved landmine detection in ground penetrating radar data

Recent advances in ground penetrating radar (GPR) fabrication and signal processing have made high fidelity detection of buried anti-tank landmines a practical possibility under field scenarios. However, detection of subsurface landmines at a low false alarm rate (FAR) requires the effective removal of the response from the air/ground interface (ground-bounce response). This in turn requires accurate and automatic tracking of the time of arrival of the air/ground interface in time-domain GPR data. Such tracking of the ground bounce response can be difficult to perform under certain conditions including the presence of surface-laid landmines, surface vegetation, snow drifts, and multiple subsurface structures like buried roadbeds. In this work, we will explore the application of a lowlatency Kalman filter applied to ground bounce tracking in GPR data and resulting performance improvements for pre-screening algorithms under extreme weather conditions.