The Impact of False Alarm Mitigation on Surface Landmine Detection in MWIR Imagery

Abstract

Surface landmine and minefield detection from airborne imagery is a difficult problem. As part of the minefield detection process, anomaly detection is performed to identify potential landmines in individual airborne images. Post-processing is performed on the initial landmines identified to reduce the number of false alarms, referred to as false alarm mitigation. In this research, a circular harmonics transform image processing approach (the CHT method) and a constant false alarm rate technique (the RX approach) are investigated for surface landmine detection and false alarm mitigation in medium wave infrared (MWIR) image data. The false alarm mitigation approach integrates the CHT and RX methods to identify candidate landmine locations with one technique at a given false alarm rate and applies the other technique to confirm landmine locations and eliminate potential false alarms. Individual detector and false alarm mitigation experimental results are presented for 31 daytime and 43 nighttime MWIR images containing 76 and 142 landmines, respectively. At a 0.9 desired probability of landmine detection, experimental results show that false alarm mitigation reduces the false alarm rate by as much as 84.3% and 13.7% for daytime and nighttime images, respectively, maintaining the probability of detection at 0.85 and 0.90, respectively.

Department(s)

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Sponsor(s)

United States. Army Research Office
Night Vision Laboratory. Countermine Division

Keywords and Phrases

RX; Airborne; Circular Harmonics; False Alarm Mitigation; Image Processing; Landmine; Transform

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1433-7541

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2004 Springer-Verlag, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Apr 2004

Link to Full Text

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