Time-frequency analysis of synthetic aperture radar images of selected ordnance pieces

We present a modification of the standard time-frequency (t-f) analysis for landmine detection. The modification is adapted to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images that may or may not exhibit near-circular symmetry. Each prospective SAR image is here sliced along several directions to generate t-f plots along those chosen cuts, and the resulting 2-D plots are correlated in pairs to obtain a relevant metric, which is defined as their ratio. This metric has served to distinguish targets from clutter objects in the various cases examined here. The procedure was validated using a dataset obtained in a recent field test, and the results are shown. (C) 2009 SPIE and IS&T. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3134134]