PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | April 26, 2007
Proc. SPIE. 6553, Detection and Remediation Technologies for Mines and Minelike Targets XII
KEYWORDS: Infrared detectors, Infrared cameras, Thermography, Infrared imaging, Statistical analysis, Detection and tracking algorithms, Image segmentation, Infrared radiation, Solar radiation, Land mines
Presently, the number of landmines planted around the world totalizes more than 110 million and, far from slowing down,
the landmine production planting rate is, at least, one order of magnitude higher than the rate at which they are removed.
In this work a technique to detect buried landmines using boundary detection in IR images, is presented. The buried
objects have different temperature than the surrounding soil. We find the object contours by means of an algorithm of
B-Spline deformable curves.
Under a statistical model, regions with different temperatures can be characterized by the values of the statistical
parameters of these distributions. Therefore, this information can be used to find boundaries among different regions in the
image.
The B-Spline approach has been widely used in curve representation for boundary detection, shape approximation,
object tracking and contour detection. Contours formulated by means of B-Splines allow local control, require few parameters
and are intrinsically smooth. The algorithm consists in estimating the parameters along lines strategically disposed
on the image. The true boundary is found when the values of these parameters vary abruptly on both sides. A likelihood
function is maximized to determine the position of such boundaries.
We present the experimental results, which show the behavior of the detection method, according to the buried object
depth and the elapsed time from the cooling initial time. The obtained results exhibit that it is possible to recognize the
shape of the objects, buried at different depths, with a low computational effort.
