Peak scatter-based buried object identification using GPR-EMI dual sensor system

Buried object identification is an integral part of the humanitarian demining process which enables discarding clutter objects, thereby reducing the overall cost of landmine localisation drastically. In this study, we present a novel buried object identification method for a ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electromagnetic induction sensor (EMI)-based dual sensor hand-held system developed at TUBITAK BILGEM. The proposed approach relies on grouping the buried objects into three groups according to their metal content using their EMI responses. Features are extracted from GPR responses of the objects and landmine/clutter discrimination is achieved within each object group using k-nearest neighbour algorithm. The identification results are presented on an extensive real data set of mine simulants and clutter objects, which is collected from three different terrains with different types of soil and different burial depths. We show that the proposed method outperforms a popular method based on edge histogram descriptors.