Threat identification in humanitarian demining using machine learning and spectroscopic metal detection

Abstract

The detection of buried minimum-metal anti-personnel landmines is a time-consuming problem, due to the high false alarm rate (FAR) arising from metallic clutter typically found in minefields. Magnetic induction spectroscopy (MIS) offers a potential way to reduce the FAR by classifying the metallic objects into threat and non-threat categories, based on their spectroscopic signatures. A new algorithm for threat identification for MIS sensors, based on a fully-connected artificial neural network (ANN), is proposed in this paper, and compared against a classifier based on Support Vector Machines (SVM). The results demonstrate that MIS is a potentially viable option for the reduction of false alarms in humanitarian demining. It is also shown that the ANN outperforms the SVM-based approach for threat objects containing minimal amounts of metal.