Comparison of vehicle-mounted forward-looking polarimetric infrared and downward-looking infrared sensors for landmine detection

Abstract

This paper gives a comparison of two vehicle-mounted infrared systems for landmine detection. The first system is a down-ward looking standard infrared camera using processing methods developed within the EU project LOTUS. The second system is using a forward-looking polarimetric infrared camera. Feature-based classification is used for this system. With these systems data have been acquired simultaneously of different test lanes from a moving platform. The performance of each system is evaluated using a leave-one-out method. On the training set the polarimetric infrared system performs better especially for low false alarm rates. On the independent evaluation set the differences are much smaller. On the ferruginous soil test lane the down-ward looking system performs better at certain points whereas on the grass test lane the forward-looking system performs better at certain points.