The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has recently examined single-polarity, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data collected in spotlight mode at X band as part of an effort to identify land mines in radar imagery. This data set consists of several single-polarization, extremely high-resolution, spotlight-mode SAR images from multiple passes over a common target area that includes various reference reflectors as well as the landmines. In earlier investigations at Ku band, we observed that a multi-look averaging scheme could enhance the contrast between mines and background clutter. In the most recent investigation, we hypothesize that a similar behavior would be present in the X band imagery, and we demonstrate how the enhanced contrast from multi-look processing leads to improved prescreener performance under certain conditions. Results are presented in the form of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for different several different prescreener parameter settings.

Date Published: 21 September 2004
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5415, Detection and Remediation Technologies for Mines and Minelike Targets IX, (21 September 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.542185

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5415:
Detection and Remediation Technologies for Mines and Minelike Targets IX
Russell S. Harmon; J. Thomas Broach; John H. Holloway Jr., Editor(s)