Detection of Magnetic Anomaly Signal Based on Information Entropy of Differential Signal

Magnetic anomaly detection is an effective approach for detecting the visually obscured ferromagnetic target, and its performance is mainly limited by background geomagnetic noise. In contrast to the traditional detection methods that rely on several a priori assumptions regarding the target or the probability of magnetic noise consisting of external geomagnetic noise and intrinsic sensor noise, we present, in this letter, a new estimator of information entropy for differential signal acquired by a pair of magnetic sensors to detect any changes in the magnetic noise pattern. First, the magnetic noise probability density function (PDF) of differential signal is estimated by using the kernel smoothing method. Then, the minimum entropy detector based on the magnetic noise PDF of differential signal is used to detect the magnetic anomaly target. Finally, according to the probabilities of false alarm, the detection threshold can be obtained to be used for abnormal judgment. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the experiment is conducted, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method has better detection performance than that of traditional methods.