The Influence of Spatial Sampling in GPR Surveys for the Detection of Landmines and IEDs

Landmine detection with GPR, is conditioned by a properly focusing of the detected anomaly in the subsurface, and this is theoretically possible only if the data have been acquired fulfilling the spatial Nyquist criterion. An under-sampled data will suffer from missing features, thus will carry a lower informative level. Especially in extreme and adverse environments, this constraint could be a huge issue. In addition, target complexity or soil heterogeneity could introduce the need for 3D acquisitions, thus significantly enhancing the time spent by an operator on the field. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparison between images obtained relaxing the Nyquist criterion, to show that even if it does not hold, the informative content of the final radar image will not be too much corrupted.