Background
MineRad |
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| A Ground Penetrating Radar for Landmine Detection | ||
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Background| Ground Penetrating Radar has been identified as one of
the more promising technologies for the detection of non-metallic landmines.
The term Ground Penetrating Radar refers to a range of electromagnetic
techniques designed with the goal to detect and locate objects or interfaces
buried beneath the earths surface [Daniels:95].
The GPR community has seen the development of two distinct techniques, namely Pulse or Impulse Radar and Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave (SFCW) Radar. While the latter technique has been investigated since 1972, it is Pulse Radar which has dominated the GPR industry. This was due to the high cost and complexity of SFCW GPR. Over the last decade the cost of RF technologies (fast switching synthesizers) has decreased considerably, making it more feasible to develop SFCW GPR. In addition the availability of fast, low cost digital signal processors has contributed to the growing interest in this implementation of a subsurface radar The University of Cape Town has been involved in GPR research for the past six years - researching and developing new and novel hardware architectures and signal processing techniques - with the primary focus on Landmine Detection. |
System
Description| MineRad
is a 900MHz to 2.1GHz Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave Ground Penetrating
Radar designed for landmine detection. It is been developed at ESD
Reunert Defence in conjunction with the University
of Cape Town.
The radar consists of a radar transciever connected to a Laptop PC via fibre optic cables. (See Figure 1). The radiators used are circularly polarised wide band antennas in a bistatic configuration. The radar transciever integrates a RF transmitter and receiver, digital controller and processor and a DC-DC . The radar parameters are listed in the Table 1 below. |
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Radar Measurements| Figure 3 (picture on the top left) shows the measurement setup used to test the radar. It consists of a 1.5m (l) x 1m(w) x 1.2m(h) sandbox situated in the corner of my office. Various targets have been buried at various depths in the sandpit and imaged with the radar. |  |
| Figure 4 (picture on the bottom left) shows the radar image for a small metal ball buried at 10cm below the sand surface. This image was taken from the display of the radar data capture software. |  |
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