Detection and discrimination of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in areas of prior conflict is of high importance to the international community and the United States government. For humanitarian applications, sensors and processing methods need to be robust, reliable, and easy to train and implement using indigenous UXO removal personnel. This paper describes system characterization, system testing, and a continental United States (CONUS) Operational Field Evaluations (OFE) of the PAC-MAG man-portable UXO detection system. System testing occurred at a government test facility in June, 2010 and December, 2011 and the OFE occurred at the same location in June, 2012. NVESD and White River Technologies personnel were present for all testing and evaluation. The PAC-MAG system is a manportable magnetometer array for the detection and characterization of ferrous UXO. System hardware includes four Cesium vapor magnetometers for detection, a Real-time Kinematic Global Position System (RTK-GPS) for sensor positioning, an electronics module for merging array data and WiFi communications and a tablet computer for transmitting and logging data. An odometer, or “hipchain” encoder, provides position information in GPS-denied areas. System software elements include data logging software and post-processing software for detection and characterization of ferrous anomalies. The output of the post-processing software is a dig list containing locations of potential UXO(s), formatted for import into the system GPS equipment for reacquisition of anomalies. Results from system characterization and the OFE will be described.
The Nemesis detection system has been developed to provide an efficient and reliable unmanned, multi-sensor, groundbased
platform to detect and mark landmines. The detection system consists of two detection sensor arrays: a Ground
Penetrating Synthetic Aperture Radar (GPSAR) developed by Planning Systems, Inc. (PSI) and an electromagnetic
induction (EMI) sensor array developed by Minelab Electronics, PTY. Limited. Under direction of the Night Vision and
Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD), overseas testing was performed at Kampong Chhnang Test Center (KCTC),
Cambodia, from May 12-30, 2008. Test objectives included: evaluation of detection performance, demonstration of
real-time visualization and alarm generation, and evaluation of system operational efficiency. Testing was performed on
five sensor test lanes, each consisting of a unique soil mixture and three off-road lanes which include curves,
overgrowth, potholes, and non-uniform lane geometry. In this paper, we outline the test objectives, procedures, results,
and lessons learned from overseas testing. We also describe the current state of the system, and plans for future
enhancements and modifications including clutter rejection and feature-level fusion.
Both force protection and humanitarian demining missions require efficient and reliable detection and discrimination of
buried anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines. Widely varying surface and subsurface conditions, mine types and
placement, as well as environmental regimes challenge the robustness of the automatic target recognition process. In
this paper we present applications created for the U.S. Army Nemesis detection platform. Nemesis is an unmanned
rubber-tracked vehicle-based system designed to eradicate a wide variety of anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines for
humanitarian demining missions. The detection system integrates advanced ground penetrating synthetic aperture radar
(GPSAR) and electromagnetic induction (EMI) arrays, highly accurate global and local positioning, and on-board target
detection/classification software on the front loader of a semi-autonomous UGV. An automated procedure is developed
to estimate the soil's dielectric constant using surface reflections from the ground penetrating radar. The results have
implications not only for calibration of system data acquisition parameters, but also for user awareness and tuning of
automatic target recognition detection and discrimination algorithms.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.