Detection of Metallic Objects in Mineralized Soil Using Magnetic Induction Spectroscopy

The detection of small metallic objects buried in mineralized soil poses a challenge for metal detectors, especially when the response from the metallic objects is orders of magnitude below the response from the soil. This article describes a new, handheld, detector system based on magnetic induction spectroscopy (MIS), which can be used to detect buried metallic objects, even in challenging soil conditions. Experimental results consisting of 1669 passes across either buried objects or empty soil are presented. Fourteen objects were buried at three different depths in three types of soil including nonmineralized and mineralized soils. A novel processing algorithm is proposed to demonstrate how spectroscopy can be used to detect metallic objects in mineralized soils. The algorithm is robust across all types of soil, objects, and depths used in this experiment and achieves a true positive rate over 99% at a false-positive rate of less than 5%, based on just a single pass over the object. It has also been shown that the algorithm does not have to be trained separately for each soil type. The data gathered in the experiment are also published to enable more research on the processing algorithms for MIS-based detectors.