Clutter and target discrimination in forward-looking ground penetrating radar using sparse structured basis pursuits

Forward-looking ground penetrating radar (FLGPR) is a remote sensing modality that has recently been investigated for buried threat detection. FLGPR offers greater standoff than other downward-looking modalities such as electromagnetic induction and downward-looking GPR, but it suffers from high false alarm rates due to surface and ground clutter. A stepped frequency FLGPR system consists of multiple radars with varying polarizations and bands, each of which interacts differently with subsurface materials and therefore might potentially be able to discriminate clutter from true buried targets. However, it is unclear which combinations of bands and polarizations would be most useful for discrimination or how to fuse them. This work applies sparse structured basis pursuit, a supervised statistical model which searches for sets of bands that are collectively effective for discriminating clutter from targets. The algorithm works by trying to minimize the number of selected items in a dictionary of signals; in this case the separate bands and polarizations make up the dictionary elements. A structured basis pursuit algorithm is employed to gather groups of modes together in collections to eliminate whole polarizations or sensors. The approach is applied to a large collection of FLGPR data for data around emplaced target and non-target clutter. The results show that a sparse structure basis pursuits outperforms a conventional CFAR anomaly detector while also pruning out unnecessary bands of the FLGPR sensor.