Novel inverse methods in land mine imaging

The imaging of buried land mines continues to present significant signal-processing challenges in the development of inverse methods for the detection of plastic mines buried in soil. To address this difficult problem, mathematical advances in the development of the elliptic systems method are used to generate images of the buried land mines. The-proposed approach adapts earlier methods, successfully applied in laser tomography of breast tumors using the diffusion equation, to the present problem of land mine imaging using the Helmholtz equation. The images generated by the new method represent electromagnetic properties of underground regions, providing effective differentiation of plastic land mines from surrounding soil. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the new method.