Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the promising non-destructive imaging tools investigations for shallow subsurface exploration such as locating and mapping the buried utilities. In practical applications, GPR images could be noisy due to the system noise, the heterogeneity of the medium, and mutual wave interactions thus, it is a complex task to recognizing the hyperbolic signature of buried objects from GPR images. Therefore, this paper aims to develop nonlinear feature extraction technique of using Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) in recognizing the four geometrical shapes (cubic, cylindrical, disc and spherical) from GPR images. A pre-processing step of isolating hyperbolic signature from different background was first employed by mean of Region of Interest (ROI). The hyperbolic signature that describes the shapes was extracted using EMD decomposition to obtain a set of significant features. In this framework, the hyperbolic pattern was decomposed of using EMD, to produce a small set of intrinsic mode functions (IMF) via sifting process. The IMF properties of the signature that exhibit the unique pattern was used as potential features to differentiate the geometrical shapes of buried objects. The extracted IMF features were then fed into machine learning classifier namely Support Vector Machines. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a set data collection of GPR-images has been acquired. The experimental results show that the recognition rate of using IMF features was achieved 99.12% accuracy in recognizing the shapes of buried objects whose shows the promising result.
