This paper deals with a three-dimensional thermal model for landmine detection problems and an inverse problem for reconstructing the physical parameters of buried objects. Moreover, solutions are given for the estimation of the soil thermal diffusivity and meteorological parameters, needed for solving the inverse problem. The paper describes the main fundamental principles of thermal modelling for buried object identification and illustrates the results on data acquired from a real minefield, together with qualitative and quantitative results illustrating the validity of the model.
The detection of buried landmines is an important problem in
regions where an army conflict has occurred. In particular, antipersonnel plastic mines cannot be detected with classical techniques, such as metal detectors. So a very promising detection technique based on a thermal model of the soil is applied to detect this kind of mines, in which infrared (IR) images of the soil are used. The core of this technique is the solution of the heat transfer process in the soil and at the soil-air interface, which is a very time consuming process. To overcome this problem we propose an analog circuit which can solve the equations that model the system reducing time cost by taking advantage of the inherent massive parallelism of the circuit. The description of the equations is made with VHDL--AMS and then an automatic synthesis tool generates a circuit which solves the equations.
KEYWORDS: Mining, Land mines, Target detection, Soil science, 3D modeling, Thermal modeling, Inverse problems, Data modeling, Thermography, Temperature metrology
The analysis of pertrubations on the thermal signature of the soil is a powerful tool for the detection of the presence of buried objects on the soil from measured infrared images but, by itself, gives litle insight in the nature of the detected targets. In this paper, we will present a method for the detection of surface and shallowly buried land mines in infrared images based on a 3D thermal model of the soil. This model will be used to detect perturbations on the expected behavior that will lead to the assumption of the presence of unknown buried objects. Next, we will outline a procedure that makes use of the theory on inverse problems in order to extract information of the natuer of the detected targets and to infer whether they actually correspond to land mines or not.
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