Metal land mines still account for a large percentage of land mines, even with the advent of the so-called plastic mines. The metal detector thus remains a viable tool in the mine detector's bag. The limitation of the metal detector is not in detection of the mines, but in the additional detection of metal clutter. A metal detector has been developed which can largely discriminate the mines from the clutter, thereby greatly reducing false alarm rates. This "mine detector" is designed to characterize the magnetic polarizability dyadic of the metal objects, and to use pattern recognition to determine the goodness-of-fit to the responses of known mines. Data are presented from test runs conducted for the US Army for buried metal mines. Data are also presented for some non-mine metal targets. The characterization of the mines as threats is performed in a totally autonomous system, with high probability-of-detection and low false alarm rate. We can also generally tell one mine type from another.
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