Land mine detection by IR temporal analysis:: Detection method

The Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) has presented several approaches to temporal analysis of thermal IR data in the application of mine detection during the years. Detection by classification is performed using a number of detection algorithms with varying, in general good, results. The FOI temporal analysis method is tested on images randomly chosen from a diurnal sequence. The test sequence show very little contrast. The reference features are taken from a known object in the scene or from a numerical model of the object of interest. In this paper variations of the method are evaluated on the same test data. Focus is on the question if increased number of data collection times affects the detection rate and false alarm rate. The ROC curves show performance better than random for all of the tested cases, and excellent for some. Detection rate increases and false alarm rate decreases with increased number of images used for some of the tested cases.