Innovating on top of I&M fundamentals for safer humanitarian demining

In this paper, we explain how the requirements for rigorous, well-defined standard operating procedures, and simple, robust, inexpensive and easy-to-use detection equipment affect key aspects of instrumentation and measurement (I&M) systems applied to landmine detection in humanitarian demining. We also show how fundamental knowledge in physics and I&M, as well as industry's practical know-how (accumulated over the past decades), can be combined with new technological advancements to build devices with improved abilities to detect, characterize, classify and locate buried hazardous objects. We use a handheld metal detector as an illustrative showcase of a relatively simple, lowcost and well-established I&M technology. The challenge is to upgrade such a device with object discrimination capabilities by bringing scientific and technological innovations at three different levels: signal level, feature extraction level and feature interpretation level.