Detection and removal of antipersonnel landmines is an important worldwide concern. A huge number of landmines has been deployed over the last twenty years, and demining will take several more decades, even if no more mines were deployed in future. An adequate mine-clearance rate can only be achieved by using new technologies such as improved sensors, efficient manipulators and mobile robots. T...

In this paper, we present the Synchronous Impulse Reconstruction Radar (SIRE) Ultra-wideband (UWB) radar designed by the Army Research Lab (ARL) for landmine and improvised explosive device (IED) detection as a 2 by 16 MIMO radar (with collocated antennas). Its improvement over its SIMO counterpart in terms of beampattern/cross range resolution are discussed and demonstrated using simulated dat...

This thesis is concerned with detection logarithms of non-metallic anti-personnel (AP) land mines and the related signal processing using stepped-frequency ground penetrating radar (SF-GPR) technique. Modern land mines are essentially made out of plastic and ceramic materials. This makes their detection using GPR sensor almost impossible without proper signal processing. Many signal processing ...

Ground penetrating radars (GPRs) are widely used for buried object search, ruin investigation, groundwater assessment, and other various applications (Sato & Takeshita, 2000) (Moriyama et al., 1997). They are also expected to find nonmetallic landmines (Bourgeois & Smith, 1998) (Montoya & Smith, 1999) (Peters Jr. & Daniels, 1994) (Sato et al., 2004) (Sato, 2005) (Sato et al., 2006). Figure 1 sh...

Signal processing is a necessary, fundamental component of all detection systems and can result in orders of magnitude improvement in the probability of detection (PD) versus false alarm rate (FAR) of almost any sensor system. A recent Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program (now ended) specifically aimed at landmines achieved dramatic improvements by developing and appl...

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a technology developed to image the electrical conductivity distribution of a conductive medium. The technology is of interest because of its low cost and also because the measurement of the electrical conductivity brings direct information about the composition of the conductive medium. Because the ground is conductive to a certain extent, the technolog...

Post-blast residues are potential interferents to chemical detection of landmines. To assess the potential problem related to 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT), its post-blast residue was identified and quantified. In the first part of this study laboratory-scale samples of TNT (2 g) were detonated in a small-scale explosivity device (SSED) to evaluate the explosive power and collect post-blast resid...

Humanitarian demining is a worldwide effort and the range of climates environments prevent any one detection method being suitable for all sites, so more tools are required safe efficient explosives sensing. Landmines emit chemical flux over time, honeybees can collect trace residues (as particles or as vapour) on their body hairs. This capability was exploited using passive allowing to freely ...