An improved correlation based detector for a hand-held landmine detector

We propose in this paper an improved correlation based GPR algorithm for a hand-held landmine detector. The previously proposed correlation based detector (CorrDet) generates prediction errors at different frequency bins and sums the prediction errors to generate a statistical quality for detection. The improved CorrDet applies weighting on the prediction errors before they are added to generate the detection value. The purpose of weighting is to emphasize the prediction error values in the frequency bins that are less affected by clutter. The weighting technique is found to be very effective, especially in detecting deep anti-tank mines and small anti-personnel mines. The performance improvement of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using seven data sets obtained at different sites and soil conditions that contain over 2300 mine targets.