Detection of landmines and underground utilities from acoustic and GPR images with a cepstral approach

This paper introduces a cepstral approach for the automatic detection of landmines and underground utilities from acoustic and ground penetrating radar (GPR) images. This approach is based on treating the problem as a pattern recognition problem. Cepstral features are extracted from a group of images, which are transformed first to 1-D signals by lexicographic ordering. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and polynomial shape coefficients are extracted from these 1-D signals to form a database of features, which can be used to train a neural network with these features. The target detection can be performed by extracting features from any new image with the same method used in the training phase. These features are tested with the neural network to decide whether a target exists or not. The different domains are tested and compared for efficient feature extraction from the lexicographically ordered 1-D signals. Experimental results show the success of the proposed cepstral approach for landmine detection from both acoustic and GPR images at low as well as high signal to noise ratios (SNRs). Results also show that the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is the most appropriate domain for feature extraction.