Combining Electromagnetic Spectroscopy and Ground-Penetrating Radar for the Detection of Anti-Personnel Landmines

Abstract

Dual mode detectors combining metal detection and ground-penetrating radar are increasingly being used during humanitarian demining operations because of their ability to discriminate metal clutter. There are many reports in the academic literature studying metal detector and ground-penetrating radar systems individually. However, the combination of these techniques has received much less attention. This paper describes the development of a novel dual modality landmine detector, which integrates spectroscopic metal detection with ground-penetrating radar. This paper presents a feature-level sensor fusion strategy based on three features extracted from the two sensors. This paper shows how the data from the two components can be fused together to enrich the feedback to the operator. The algorithms presented in this paper are targeted at automating the location of buried, visibly obscured objects; however, the system described is also capable of collecting information which could also be used for the potential classification of such items.

Detection of Metallic Objects in Mineralized Soil Using Magnetic Induction Spectroscopy

“…It can be seen that the spectrum of the landmine is significantly smaller than that of the uncooperative soil. These frequencies were chosen to capture the typical response curves from the AP landmines, based on prior work [20], [27]. For each of these test conditions, the handheld sensor was swept across the buried objects and results were recorded for further processing.…”

“…There is a small deviation from this pattern in the spectra shown here, which falls within the standard deviation of the measurements. This is likely due to noise in either the object or the calibration measurement [20]. The objects are grouped together based on the magnitudes of their spectra.…”

“…A new dual-modality detector based on the combination of MIS and GPR, specifically developed for humanitarian demining, is under development at the University of Manchester. Early results of data fusion using both sensor modalities, together with an in-depth description of the overall system, have been reported in previous work [20]. To improve the results of the sensor fusion in the dual-modality detector system, it is first necessary to improve the output from the individual sensor components.…”

Magnetic Induction Tomography Spectroscopy for Structural and Functional Characterization in Metallic Materials

“…On the other hand, industrial implementations vary from detection, classification and characterization. Spectroscopic metal detection provides rich and distinctive information about a target to help reduce the false alarm rate in landmine detection [22], as well as for buried pipeline tracing in difficult terrain [23]. Additionally, the metal recycling sector requires sorting processes, for which a classification of non-ferrous metals based on MIS was developed in [24].…”

Ballistic Ground Penetrating Radar Equipment for Blast-Exposed Security Applications

“…As a consequence, GPR equipment have been recently been included in demining platforms as a complementary unit with a metal detector to achieve considerable improvements in detection performance, clearance rate, and a significant reduction in false alarms [25,26]. In terms of the technology readiness level, the most advanced systems are the US Army AN/PSS-14 (formerly Handheld Standoff Mine Detection System, HSTAMIDS) hand-held detector [27] developed by CyTerra (now L-3 Communications, US), the Anglo-German Vallon-Cobham VMR3 Minehound (formerly MINETECT) humanitarian detector [28], the ALIS (Advanced Land Mine Imaging System), developed by Tohoku University (Japan), and the CEIA (Italy) [29].…”