Detection of land mines via a passive microwave radiometer

The concept of using passive microwave radiometers for the detection of buried objects is well rooted in the theory of radiation propagation through lossy media. As the dielectric discontinuity at the boundary layer between the foreign object and the soil cause a reflection of the incoming radiation,the object present different radiometric properties than the surrounding background, and becomes detectable as a change in the antenna temperature. Under a contract from the US Army's Night Vision and Electronics Sensors, TRW has designed and built two hand-held man- portable units, which employ the cold radiometric sky as the illuminating source. The units work at 1.7 and 5 GHz using direct RF-gain, total-power radiometers. The units were field-tested at the Army facility at Fort AP Hill during October of 1998. The test yielded a very exciting detection rate of 100 percent and a false alarm rate of 0.28/m 2 .