Influence of the Symmetry Neural Network Morphology on the Mine Detection Metric

Abstract

Presently, active detectors are widely used to detect mines, providing high accuracy. However, the principle of the operation of active detectors can lead to the explosion of hidden mines. The novelty of this work is the development of the morphology of a neural network for the classification of mines made of different materials (metallic, semi-metallic, plastic) with high accuracy (99.23%), based on a vector of input features with the following components: the value of the output voltage of the FLC-100 magnetic field sensor, which measures magnetic field anomalies in the vicinity of mines with an accuracy of 10−10–10−4 Tesla; six different soil types, depending on the humidity; and the height at which the magnetic field sensor is located above the mine. Due to the fact that mines, when made of different materials (metallic, semi-metallic, plastic), have different magnetic properties, the neural network method of mine classification, based on the sensor data regarding anomalies of the magnetic field in the vicinity of mines, allows the classification of mines made of different materials. The accuracy of mine classification was assessed with two-layer and three-layer neural networks on various metrics (confusion matrix, ROC curves, accuracy–loss curves), using ADAM, RMSprop, and SGD optimisers, and analyses and comparisons were then carried out. The impact of asymmetry in the neuron number and the types of activation functions in the first and second hidden layers on the values of the accuracy and loss metrics was studied. In particular, it was established that the asymmetry of the number of neurons in the first and second hidden layers relative to the plane of symmetry between the hidden layers has a significant effect on the accuracy of the model (decrease in accuracy by 25%), while the loss function, when the symmetry of the neurons number in the hidden layers is violated, increases to a maximum of 50%.