Browsing by Author "Lombardi, F."

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    Bistatic radar signature of buried landmines
    (IET, 2017-10) Lombardi, F.; Griffiths, H. D.; Balleri, Alessio
    With the proliferation of low-intensity conflict, landmines have proven to be one of the weapons of choice for both government and guerrilla forces around the world. Recent improvements to mine technology pose increasingly significant problems for demining operations, requiring the constant upgrading of countermine technologies. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is one of the most exhaustively researched topics in the detection of buried mines as it can be used to detect non-metallic and plastic mines. However, identification and recognition are still unsolved problems, due to the scattering similarity between mines and clutter objects. This study provides an experimental evaluation of the improvements that a bistatic approach could yield and what can be gained from investigating the angular dependencies of the landmine radar signature.
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    Dependence of landmine radar signature on aspect angle
    (IET, 2017-02-06) Lombardi, F.; Griffiths, H. D.; Wright, L.; Balleri, Alessio
    Antipersonnel landmines have been indiscriminately used since World War II, and their longterm persistence in the ground creates a barrier to development in a large number of countries, forcing people to live in constant fear. Therefore, there is a growing demand for reliable landmine inspection systems that could achieve an exhaustive detection to and return the land to its normal use. Due to its ability of detecting both metallic and non-metallic objects, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has successfully been demonstrated to be a meaningful method for detecting landmines, allowing faster and safer operations. Most landmines may be considered as multiple layered dielectric cylinders, which each interface causes a reflection, properties that are hardly expected in other commonly encountered clutter objects. Considering that these features have their own angular pattern and will respond differently to different illumination, landmines are expected to produce signatures that present some discriminant features that could be used for reducing the false alarm rate of GPR equipment. In this paper, a set of measurements of three inert landmines has been acquired to study and characterise landmine signatures as a function of the antenna orientation relative to the landmine and target aspect angle.
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    Preliminary results on multi offset GPR for imaging of landmines
    (IEEE, 2017-07-31) Lombardi, F.; Griffiths, H. D.; Balleri, Alessio; Lualdi, L.
    Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is widely recognised as an operationally useful sensor for mine detection as it can offer better detection performance than the ubiquitous metal detector in the presence of low-metal content mines. However, GPR has to overcome many potential sources of false alarm due to clutter and battlefield debris, which lower the efficiency of the sensor. This paper analyses a set of experimental data collected in a recent multi-offset GPR measurement campaign with inert landmines composed of different assemblies buried in sandy soil. The aim of the work is to evaluate the key differences observed by a radar system when the transmitter and the receiver are moved apart, as a function of their distance and hence when the illuminated section of the target is diversified. The results of the comparison between the collected multi-offset profiles show that using a bistatic geometry could represent a strategy to reconstruct composite objects with finer and better details.