A high range resolution ground penetrating radar signal is processed to convert the A-scan data into a binary valued string in which a one represents the location of an impedance change and a zero otherwise. For non-metallic landmines it has been shown that this pattern is unique and can be used to discriminate among landmines and clutter. The discrimination method is based on regular languages which consist of the binarized sequences produced by various landmines. Methods have been developed to automatically create language recognizers which not only recognize a landmine's characteristic string, but also variations of those strings.