Thermal infrared identification of buried landmines

Abstract

This paper deals with a three-dimensional thermal model for landmine detection problems and an inverse problem for reconstructing the physical parameters of buried objects. Moreover, solutions are given for the estimation of the soil thermal diffusivity and meteorological parameters, needed for solving the inverse problem. The paper describes the main fundamental principles of thermal modelling for buried object identification and illustrates the results on data acquired from a real minefield, together with qualitative and quantitative results illustrating the validity of the model.