Detection of land mines using fuzzy and possibilistic membership functions

This paper introduces a new system for real-time land mine detection using sensor data generated by a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). The GPR produces a three-dimensional array of intensity values, representing a volume below the surface of the ground. Features are computed from this array and two types of membership degrees are assigned to each location. A fuzzy membership value provides a degree of belongingness of a given observation in the classes of mines, false alarms, and background, while a possibilistic membership value provides a degree of typicality. Both membership degrees are combined using simple rules to assign a confidence value. The parameters of the membership functions are obtained by clustering the training data and using the statistics of each partition. Our preliminary results show that the proposed approach is simple, efficient, and yet, yields results comparable to more complex detection systems.