Doppler-vibrometer landmine-detection system operated from a moving vehicle
Abstract
Detection of landmines at modest distances from a moving vehicle is desired to help protect soldiers from explosive threats. The US Department of Defense developed a sensor system to observe seismic vibration patterns that lead to detection of buried objects in unpaved roads. The system is capable of exciting soil acoustically and observing seismic responses while advancing at 1m/s with a 30m standoff. The optical design and build created 960 simultaneous independent spatial observations that collect data over a 0.5m x 1m area. A gimbal then repositions the sensor to collect a new region. In this sequential manner the system can scan 2m x 1km in less than 30min. Active gimbal stabilization kept beam positions relatively stable on the ground while the vehicle was in motion. Inertial sensing reduced gross Doppler components common to all channels. Even with these corrections, channel dropouts remained a challenge, so filtering of erroneous samples in time and space was required to improve the data quality. Automated target recognition algorithms quickly process the spatial vibration data to warn operators of a threat. We present here an overview of the system and collected data. The system proved effective at finding buried threats that produced seismic anomalies at the surface, but additional challenges lie in differentiating target responses from clutter. The seismic response of naturally occurring environmental clutter in roads produces responses that appear similar to objects of interest, reducing the effectiveness of target detection algorithms.
- Publication:
-
Detection and Sensing of Mines, Explosive Objects, and Obscured Targets XXIV
- Pub Date:
- May 2019
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.2519299
- Bibcode:
- 2019SPIE11012E..0WL