UAV Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar for Landmine Detection

Abstract

The development of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and communication systems contributed to the availability of more applications using UAVs in military and civilians purposes. Anti-personnel landmines deployed by militia groups in conflict zones are a life threat for civilians and need cautious handling while removing. The UAV Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar (TSAR) can reconstruct three-dimension images of the investigation domain to prescreen nonmetallic landmines. A nonmetallic landmine cannot be detected using conventional ground penetrating radars when the scattering field is undetected due to the dielectric permittivity. In this paper, imaging the underground for detecting landmine using TSAR is proposed. The TSAR has the capability of prosing the data in discrete mode regardless of the altitude of UAV’s radar. A landmine is always buried less than a feet depth. L-band frequency is used to provide high resolution and to penetrate deep in dry soil. More than one UAVs are used to multistatic scan the investigation space. The geometric diversity of multistatic distribution of the sensors will provide more information about the buried nonmetallic landmines, certain features, and their location. The data collected from the sensors will align with the geolocation data obtained from the UAV’s system for processing. Dynamic flying can be used to predict the electromagnetic response of the scattering field to create a dynamic matching filter using the Green’s function under first-order Born approximation. The occurring air-soil interference has been removed as an unwanted reflection from the ground while keeping the signal coming from underground. Using the Born approximation assumption created an ill-posed linear system solved by the Conjugate Gradient algorithm. Simulation results are presented to validate the method.