Towards real-time detection of landmines in FLIR imagery

A pipelined algorithm and parallel architecture is under development for real time detection of landmines. Our previous work has dealt with monochromatic images from airborne active infrared scanners and images from a low-altitude aircraft-mounted multi-spectral scanner. Because of the nature of the sensors and the aerial observation platform, the landmines were treated as small, sparse, discrete objects in a large clutter field. Our current work deals with passive infrared imagery obtained from cameras mounted on ground vehicle. In contrast to the previous work, although the targets are still relatively sparse, they are no longer small in the sense of occupying just a few pixels and the signal to noise ratio is considerably worse than in for the airborne active infrared and multi-spectral scanner problems. So significant changes to our detection algorithm are needed. The paper describes the overall algorithm and the particular issues, such as irregular shapes, that need to be dealt with in FLIR imagery. Some early results are presented. In addition, changes in computer processing power and interprocessor communications has led to a rethink of the real-time hardware implementations of the system and these issues are discussed.