With the emergence of commercially available multisensor mine detection systems, the need for standardised test and evaluation procedures becomes more pressing. For metal detectors this already has been established and is laid down in the CEN workshop document CWA14747:2003. The ITEP multisensor working group has taken the first step towards a similar document, by means of a so called "best practice" document, which would ultimately lead to a proper standard. In this paper we address various issues important for multisensor mine detection testing and evaluation and in this way hope to contribute to a draft version of the "best practice" document encouraging other parties to do the same and hence speed up the process of standardisation.

Many researchers and system developers have proposed exploiting synthetic aperture processing to enhance the spatial resolution of subsurface radar imaging for mine and UXO detection. In this paper, we examine the 3D spatial impulse response associated with alternative geometries for synthetic aperture data collection. Several alternative radar geometries have been chosen for examination corresponding to both forward-looking as well as down- looking configurations.

Recently, considerable attention has been directed to the use of airborne synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) for detecting both large and small underground objects. The reconstruction of images of buried objects from SAR data, however, often relies on assumptions and algorithms developed in the context of free-space radar propagation. Although in some cases the implicit assumption of free-space propagation can lead to acceptable results, in other important cases it will result in severe degradation to images of underground objects. In this paper we investigate the conditions under which significant improvements to image quality result if proper account is taken of the detailed effects of the soil medium on radar wave propagation. These effects are analyzed both in terms of the refraction of plane waves and via reference to general analytic solutions to Maxwell's equations. Quantitative predictions of the improvement in buried-target image focussing are presented for some realistic data collection scenarios, corresponding to airborne and ground-based SAR or microwave holography.© (1994) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

: As part of an ongoing effort to determine the utility of ultra- wideband (UWB) radar systems for military application, an experimental program was developed and executed to collect terrain clutter data using high resolution waveforms in the ultra high frequency (UHF) spectral region. Two approaches to the design of the radar instrumentation to be used to collect these data were considered: an impulse system with a nominal 1 ns pulse duration and a conventional stepped-chirp instrumentation radar covering the same frequency range. A novel feature of the program was the use of a scanned linear aperture to simulate the use of a large, ideally weighted real aperture antenna system, In this paper, the theoretical analysis done to predict and compare the performance expected from either system approach is presented in terms of the noise-equivalent reflectivity of the clutter measurement system, the time to collect data, and the impact of the linearly scanned aperture on sensitivity, angular resolution, and data collection time.