GPR has been used in civil engineering, geology and the detection of buried mines, and so on. For the detection of buried mines, GPR techniques has many important advantages over the other detection techniques and is being considered as a very viable surveillance tool for landmine detection.
Current landmine detection GPR systems can be cast into two main categories as down looking GPR (DLGPR) and forward looking GPR (FLGPR). There are many advantages of FLGPR over DLGPR. FLGPR is capable of collecting data for a much larger area in a much shorter time than DLGPR and imaging from a safe distance. Furthermore, FLGPR can usually provide multiple observations on the same spot as the system moves forward, and can take advantage of multi look processing to improve its detection capability. Due to these merits, FLGPR is considered as an important technology by the landmine detection community.
A fully coherent, continuous wave (CW), stepped-frequency, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) approach was chosen as being the most appropriate and versatile radar implementation. The design is relatively simple and amplifiers are readily available. This approach allows for the production of a flat, wideband spectrum, ease in signal processing and system calibration, and ease in skipping narrowband interferers and reserved frequencies.
