A solution to unexploded ordnance detection problem from its magnetic anomaly using Kaczmarz regularization

Abstract

Old military events pose a critical and severe problem for many countries, including the Egyptian northwestern coast. These result in extensive areas of surface/subsurface landmines that affect the economic development plans of many countries. Detection of these landmines becomes a target for many geophysical research teams. Currently, unconventional near-surface flight technologies, such as quad-hexacopters instead of regular land surveys, are used for safety reasons in the acquisition phase. We have introduced a new processing and modeling technique of magnetic data conducted over mines or near-surface geophysical targets for accurate and precise determination of location and depth. The technique is based on the application of the Kaczmarz regularization method to the ill-posed magnetic inverse problem. The advantage of this method is the optimum transformation of regularized normal equations to an equivalent augmented regularized normal system of equations. The condition number of the updated system, which determines the degree of ill posedness, is greatly lower than the original one; this improves and guarantees a good solution to the system. The method is applied to an unexploded ordnance (UXO) test site in the United Kingdom. Our results have determined that the technique is appropriate and promising in efficiently addressing a wide number of problems that are important to near-surface geophysicists, including UXO detection.