volume | PIER Journals

Abstract

Detection andestimation of depth of shallow buried landmines using microwave remote sensing is a complex and computationally intensive task. Despite a lot of research to correctly locate and identify the buried landmines, and to estimate its depth using microwave remote sensing data which is essential for demining with minimal risk, a lot of uncertainties still exist. Therefore in this paper, an extensive study using a groundbasedX-bandscatterometer for detection of shallow buried landmine and estimation of its depth has been carriedout. An experimental setup consisting of a ground basedscatterometer operating in microwave X-band(10 GHz, 3 cm) has been usedto generate backscatter data in a gridof 24×24 and a series of experiments under laboratory conditions conducted using dummy landmines (without explosives) buried to different depths up to 10 cm in dry smooth sand. It is difficult to detect the buried landmine by visual inspection of the raw data; therefore a novel approach by fusion of image processing techniques with electromagnetic (EM) analysis has been evolvedfor detection andestimation of depth of the landmine. The raw data generated through the experiments was processedthrough a series of image processing steps and a region of interest segmentedusing Otsu andmaxim um entropy based thresholding methods for further processing. A detection figure test has been proposedat this stage to reduce false alarms. Genetic algorithm (GA) with an electromagnetic (EM) model fusion has been proposedto estimate the depth after segmenting a suspectedregion containing the mine. The main advantage of the proposed model is that it does not have any requirement of separate training and test data set to train the optimizer and validate the results. Analyses of the results indicate that it is possible to segment suspected region of interest containing the landmines in data obtained in microwave Xband using either of the two thresholding methods. The depth of buriedland mines estimatedusing the proposed GA optimized EM model was also foundto be in goodagreemen t with the actual depth. The proposedanalysis is expectedto be extremely useful in future in detection and estimation of the depth of landmines using satellite data in microwave X-band.

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Dr. Kailash Chandra Tiwari

Dr. Dharmendra Singh

Dr. Manoj Arora