Measurement and localization of interface wave reflections from a buried target

It is demonstrated that seismic interface waves on the surface of a natural beach can be used to identify the position of a buried object. For this experiment, the waves were created with a sediment-coupling transducer and received on a three-element horizontal line array of triaxial geophones. The source and its coupling to the medium provided a high degree of signal repeatability, which was useful in improving signal-to-noise ratio. Reception of all three directions of particle velocity made it possible to augment conventional beamforming techniques with polarization filters to enhance interface-wave components. Reverberation in the beach was found to be large, though, and coherent background subtraction was required to isolate the component of the sound field reflected by the target. Propagation loss measurements provided comparisons of reflected signal power with predictions made previously, and the two were found to agree closely.