Detection and characterization of buried landmines using infrared thermography

The application of infrared thermography to the detection and characterization of buried landmines (more generally, buried objects) is introduced. The problem is aimed at detecting the presence of objects buried under the ground and characterize them by estimating their thermal and geometrical properties using infrared measurements on the soil surface. Mathematically, this problem can be stated as an inverse problem for reconstructing a piecewise constant coefficient of a three-dimensional heat equation in a parallelepiped from only one measurement taken at one plane of its boundary (the air-soil interface). Due to the lack of spatial information in the observed data, this problem is extremely ill-posed. In order to reduce its ill-posedness, keeping in mind the application of detecting buried landmines, we make use of some simplification steps and propose a two-step method for solving it. The performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated with numerical examples.