Discrimination experiments with the U.S. Army's standard metal detector

Discrimination experiments with the U.S. Army's standard hand-held metal detector (AN/PSS-12) are described. An appendix describes the functioning of the device as a metal detector, and the body of the paper discusses modifications to the device necessary to carry out the discrimination experiments. Half of the mines in a large blind test grid were correctly identified with nearly zero false alarms, but the false alarm rate increased substantially for detection probabilities greater than one half. Degradation in performance is attributed to low signal-to-noise ratio from low metallic content mines buried deep in the soil. One measurement was taken with the object centered with respect to the search coils and four more with the object between the concentric search coils in the north, south, east, and west directions. Discrimination performance using all spatial measurements was shown to be superior to that obtained when using only the centered measurement, indicating that spatial measurement diversity is needed to adequately define all the unique modes of a target's polarizability tensor.