Clutter reduction and target detection in Ground Penetrating Radar data using wavelets

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) signatures of shallowly buried objects tend to be obscured by the return from the air-soil interface. In this paper an estimate of this background signal is computed locally and, abrupt changes from this estimate, assumed to correspond to the returns from a buried object, are detected using a translation invariant wavelet packet decomposition (TIWPD). The detection statistic is defined as the sum of several peak energy values of the resulting translation invariant wavelet signal representation. The computation takes place in a running window which allows the algorithm to adapt to variations in ground conditions and antenna height.