Gu IYH, Tjahjadi T

Proc. of SPIE Annual Int. Symp. on Aerospace/Defense Sensing, Simulation, and Control (Detection and Remediation Technologies for Mines and Minelike Targets VI), 2001, Vol 4393, 275-283.

Abstract

Airborne or vehicle-borne sensor-based techniques are potentially attractive approaches for fast detection of landmine field towards efficient and safety humanitarian demining. The measured data in such cases has a rather low spatial resolution due to the altitude of measurements. Landmines in an IR image are either indicated directly due to their temperature difference to background, or indirectly by signs of digging or disturbance patterns. This paper proposes a novel method for automatically detecting landmine candidates by exploiting features associated with landmine point patterns. We describe a special type of multiresolution isotropic bandpass filter for detecting these landmine candidates and other man-made landmarks on the ground surface (which may be used for locating mine fields). The introduction of multiresolution to the detection filter enables both good detectability and localization of landmine candidates. However, the method cannot distinguish landmine candidates from clutter sharing similar spatial patterns. Therefore, it is only suitable for detecting landmine fields, or, candidates of landmines. For reliable individual mine detection, landmine discrimination performed on several images measured from vehicle-borne and airborne sensors over the test bed scenarios, and some results are included.