A team of researchers from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) has won the 2013 EURASIP Best Paper Award. The findings in this paper could lead to better land mine detection methods.

ECE Professors James H. McClellan and Waymond R. Scott and their former Ph.D. student, Ali Cafer Gurbuz, received this award for their paper titled "Compressive Sensing for Subsurface Imaging Using Ground Penetrating Radar." Gurbuz received the award on the team's behalf at the 21st European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), held in Marrakech, Morocco. Gurbuz graduated with his Ph.D. in 2008 and is now an associate professor with TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, Turkey.

The paper, published in the October 2009 issue of Signal Processing, presented a novel data acquisition and imaging algorithm for Ground Penetrating Radars (GPR) based on the theory of compressive sensing. For a GPR land-mine detection system, the acquisition can run more than 10 times faster than conventional Nyquist-rate sampling. At the same time, the inversion algorithm based on compressive sensing produces high-quality images of underground objects that are, in many respects, better than standard imaging results.