Thermal systems for landmine detection Marco D’Angelo, Luca Del Vecchio, Salvatore Esposito 1 , Marco Balsi 1 , Stanisław Jankowski 2 Department of Electronic Engineering 1 , Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Eudossiana 18, 00184, Rome, Italy Institute of Electronic Systems 2 , Warsaw University of Technology, Nowowiejska 15/19, 00-665, Warszawa, Poland 1 email: balsi@uniroma1.it 2 email: sjank@ise.pw.edu.pl ABSTRACT: This paper presents new techniques of landmine detection and localization using thermal methods. Described methods use both dynamical and static analysis. The work is based on datasets obtained from the Humanitarian Demining Laboratory of Università La Sapienza di Roma, Italy. Keywords: exponential analysis, feature selection, generalized orthogonal forward regression, mine detection. 1. THE PROBLEM OF LANDMINE DETECTION Nowadays more than 80 countries in the world are contaminated by the presence of explosive remnants of war (ERW), like anti-personnel mines (APM) or, unexploded objects (UXO) and about 15000-20000 people are injured every year because of them. Many techniques have been developed during the years for detecting ERWs buried in the ground, like metal detectors, ground penetrating radars, trained animals, and many more are in a research phase: among them, the most promising appears to be the thermal analysis, which has no dependence on metal content and gives good results for detecting shallow objects with a significantly small amount of false alarms. 1.1 Physical principles of thermal detection The physical basis for the detection of buried mines is the difference in heat diffusivity of the materials the mine is composed of, with respect to the simple soil. The materials present into a mine (explosive materials, but also air) have a significantly lower diffusivity than the simple soil. For this reason, when the surface of the ground is heated, portions of it situated over the mine heat up more rapidly and cool down slowlier than elsewhere, because heat flow towards deeper levels is slowed down by the explosive or air. Therefore, the ground over the mine ends up warmer than other areas for a significant amount of time. Photonics Applications in Astronomy, Communications, Industry, and High-Energy Physics Experiments 2009, edited by Ryszard S. Romaniuk, Krzysztof S. Kulpa, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7502, 75022F · © 2009 SPIE · CCC code: 0277-786X/09/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.839614 Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7502 75022F-1