Discrimination and identification of unexploded ordinances (UXO) using airborne magnetic gradients

Abstract

The problem of discriminating the magnetic dipoles of objects on the surface of the earth, possible unexploded ordinances (UXO), from the effect of the earth’s magnetic field in airborne magnetic field gradient data was proposed. A model of simultaneous equations was developed which hoped to discriminate between the effect of the earth’s magnetic field and the possible UXO by solving for multiple dipoles using multiple data points. The simplifying assumption, that the location of each dipole is known, proved to produce unfavorable results when the flight path has a varying altitude making the model impractical. Current work suggests that a more practical solution to the problem can be achieved with subspace tracking.