Radar Signal Processing for Landmine Detection
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Cobham are seeking an academic partner and a PhD student with an expertise in signal processing methods for an Industrial Mathematics Internship.
Cobham is an international company engaged in the development, delivery and support of leading edge aerospace and defence technology and systems.
Candidate profile and key technical skills required:
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The intern will be a scientist or mathematician with an innovative and practical problem solving approach to implementing advanced signal processing methods in a vital and life saving application.
Project Description:
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Landmine clearance remains a pressing problem in many areas of the world. Ground penetrating radar is used successfully to detect buried landmines and other devices. While the radar sensor has a high probability of detection, it has a false alarm rate that is greater than desired and means to reduce this are sought.
The general process of ground penetrating radar data acquisition is an inverse scattering situation. The challenge of this programme of work is to devise and implement a signal processing method that optimises the overall radar system signal-to-noise and signal-to-clutter ratio.
The propagation situation is somewhat ill-posed, as propagation parameters such as velocity and path attenuation vary with ground conditions, hence successful techniques may need to iteratively adjust to such variations while the detector is used to search for landmines. The processing power available is limited by the need to operate the radar from self contained power sources, which in turn defines the capability of the processing engines.
A variety of processing approaches have been investigated by many workers and these include inverse scattering methods such as Synthetic Aperture Radar, migration, tomography, holography reverse time of flight as well as other non inverse methods such as Principal Component Analysis, Singularity Analysis, Deconvolution techniques, Time and Frequency Domain analysis, spatial and image processing.
The outcome from the project would ideally be the development, implementation and successful field test of signal processing algorithms within the existing radar processor that enable reduction of false alarms by a factor of 5 from the present level. False alarms are caused by a number of factors, some related to ground surface features, some related to operator variability in search techniques and some related to anomalies within the ground. The signal processing may either reduce these effects or optimise and classify the signature from the landmine, hence increasing the overall signal-to-clutter ratio.
The intern will work within Cobham Technical Services division, in close partnership with the team of scientist and engineers currently dedicated to this work.
Duration of the project:
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6 months
Company location:
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Leatherhead, Surrey
Application process:
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To apply, please send a CV and a cover letter to Lorcan Mac Manus, [log in to unmask]
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