Recognition of moving ground targets by measuring and processing seismic signal

Because vehicles moving over ground generate a succession of impacts, the soil disturbances propagate away from the source as seismic waves. Thus, in the battlefield environment, we can detect moving ground vehicles by means of measuring seismic signals using a seismic velocity transducer, and automatically classify and recognize them by advance signal processing method. Because seismic sensor is easy to be developed by emerging micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) technology, seismic detection that will be low cost, low power, small volume and light weight is a promising method for moving ground targets. Such a detection method can be used in many different fields, such as battlefield surveillance. traffic monitoring, law enforcement and so on. The paper researches seismic signals of typical vehicle targets in order to extract features of seismic signal and to recognize targets. As a data fusion method, the technique of artificial neural networks (ANN) is applied to recognize seismic signals for vehicle targets. An improved BP algorithm and ANN data fusion architecture have been presented to improve learning speed and avoid local minimum points in error curve. The algorithm had been used for classification and recognition of seismic signals of vehicle targets in the outdoor environment. It can be proven that moving ground vehicles can be detected by measuring seismic signal, feature extraction of target seismic signal is correct and ANN data fusion is effective to solve the recognition and classification problem for moving ground targets. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.