Detection of explosive hazards using spectrum features from forward-looking ground penetrating radar imagery

Buried explosives have proven to be a challenging problem for which ground penetrating radar (GPR) has shown to be effective. This paper discusses an explosive hazard detection algorithm for forward looking GPR (FLGPR). The proposed algorithm uses the fast Fourier transform (FFT) to obtain spectral features of anomalies in the FLGPR imagery. Results show that the spectral characteristics of explosive hazards differ from that of background clutter and are useful for rejecting false alarms (FAs). A genetic algorithm (GA) is developed in order to select a subset of spectral features to produce a more generalized classifier. Furthermore, a GA-based K-Nearest Neighbor probability density estimator is employed in which targets and false alarms are used as training data to produce a two-class classifier. The experimental results of this paper use data collected by the US Army and show the effectiveness of spectrum based features in the detection of explosive hazards.