Enhanced landmine detection from low resolution IR image sequences

Abstract

We deal with the problem of landmine field detection using low-resolution infrared (IR) image sequences measured from airborne or vehicle-borne passive IR cameras. The proposed scheme contains two parts: a) employ a multi-scale detector, i.e., a special type of isotropic bandpass filters, to detect landmine candidates in each frame; b) enhance landmine detection through seeking maximum consensus of corresponding landmine candidates over image frames. Experiments were conducted on several IR image sequences measured from airborne and vehicle-borne cameras, where some results are included. As shown in our experiments, the landmine signatures have been significantly enhanced using the proposed scheme, and automatic detection results are reasonably good. These methods can therefore be applied to assisting humanitarian demining work for landmine field detection. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.