A classification approach based on SVM for electromagnetic subsurface sensing

In clearing terrains contaminated or potentially contaminated by landmines and/or unexploded ordnances (UXOs), a quick wide-area surveillance is often required. Nevertheless, the identification of dangerous areas (instead of the detection of each subsurface object) can be enough for some scenarios/applications, allowing a suitable level of security in a cost-saving way. In such a framework, this paper describes a probabilistic approach for the definition of risk maps. Starting from the measurement of the scattered electromagnetic field, the probability of occurrence of dangerous targets in an investigated subsurface area is determined through a suitably defined classifier based on a support vector machine. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach and to evaluate its robustness, selected numerical results related to a two-dimensional geometry are presented.