Introduction

Abstract

This introductory part surveys the research and development (R&D) trends of the detection and removal technology of anti-personnel landmines for humanitarian purpose, and also introduces Japanese activities in this field. Current status and future directions of technologies for humanitarian demining are presented, with reference to a Japanese project named Research and development of sensing technology, access and control technology to support humanitarian demining of anti-personnel mines. This project has been funded by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), the supervisory organization of which is the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The concept of the developed systems is to cause no explicit alarm and to leave decision-making using subsurface images to the operators, in the way medical doctors can find cancer by reading CT images. This book is divided into three parts, and the details of each device are discussed in the corresponding part. © 2009 Springer London.