Hierarchical Methods for Landmine Detection with Wideband Electro-Magnetic Induction and Ground Penetrating Radar Multi-Sensor Systems

A variety of algorithms are presented and employed in a hierarchical fashion to discriminate both Anti-Tank (AT) and Anti-Personnel (AP) landmines using data collected from Wideband Electro-Magnetic Induction (WEMI) and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) sensors mounted on a robotic platform. The two new algorithms for WEMI are based on the In-phase vs. Quadrature plot (the Argand diagram) of the complex measurement obtained at a single spatial location. The Angle Prototype Match method uses the sequence of angles as a feature vector. Prototypes are constructed from these feature vectors and used to assign mine confidence to a test sample. The Angle Model Based KNN method uses a two parameter model; where the parameters are fit to the In-phase and Quadrature data. For the GPR data, the Linear Prediction Processing and Spectral Features are calculated. All four features from WEMI and GPR are used in a Hierarchical Mixture of Experts model to increase the landmine detection rate. The EM algorithm is used to estimate the parameters of the hierarchical mixture. Instead of a two way mine/non-mine decision, the HME structure is trained to make a five way decision which aids in the detection of the low metal anti personnel mines.