Application of the normalized surface magnetic charge model to UXO discrimination in cases with overlapping signals

This paper presents an application of the normalized surface magnetic charge (NSMC) model to discriminate objects of interest, such as unexploded ordnance (UXO), from innocuous items in cases when UXO electromagnetic induction (EMI) responses are contaminated by signals from other objects. Over the entire EMI spectrum considered here (tens of Hertz up to several hundreds of kHz), the scattered magnetic field outside the object can be produced mathematically by equivalent magnetic charges. The amplitudes of these charges are determined from measurement data and normalized by the excitation field. The model takes into account the scatterer's heterogeneity and near- and far-field effects. For classification algorithms, the frequency spectrum of the total NSMC is proposed and investigated as a discriminant. The NSMC is combined with the differential evolution (DE) algorithm in a two-step inversion procedure. To illustrate the applicability of the DE–NSMC algorithm, blind test data are processed and analyzed for cases in which signals from nearby objects frequently overlap. The method was highly successful in distinguishing UXO from accompanying clutter.