Implementation of an Artificial Intelligence Approach to GPR Systems for Landmine Detection

Abstract

Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approaches are applied to detect and determine the object class using a special set of the UltraWideBand (UWB) pulse Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) sounding results. It used the results of GPR sounding with the antenna system, consisting of one radiator and four receiving antennas located around the transmitting antenna. The presence of four receiving antennas and, accordingly, the signals received from four spatially separated positions of the antennas provide a collection of signals received after reflection from an object at different angles and, due to this, to determine the location of the object in a coordinate system, connected to the antenna. We considered the sums and differences of signals received by two of the four antennas in six possible combinations: (1 and 2, 1 and 3, 2 and 3, 1 and 4, etc.). These combinations were then stacked sequentially one by one into one long signal. Synthetic signals constructed in such a way contain many more notable differences and specific information about the class to which the object belongs as well as the location of the searched object compared to the signals obtained by an antenna system with just one radiating and one receiving antenna. It therefore increases the accuracy in determining the object’s coordinates and its classification. The pulse radiation, propagation, and scattering are numerically simulated by the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. Results from the experiment on mine detection are used to examine ANN too. The set of signals from different objects having different distances from the GPR was used as a training and testing dataset for ANN. The training aims to recognize and classify the detected object as a landmine or other object and to determine its location. The influence of Gaussian noise added to the signals on noise immunity of ANN was investigated. The recognition results obtained by using an ANN ensemble are presented. The ensemble consists of fully connected and recurrent neural networks, gated recurrent units, and a long-short term memory network. The results of the recognition by all ANNs are processed by a meta network to provide a better quality of underground object classification.