Sensor fusion for airborne landmine detection

Sensor fusion has become a vital research area for mine detection because of the counter-mine community's conclusion that no single sensor is capable of detecting mines at the necessary detection and false alarm rates over a wide variety of operating conditions. The U. S. Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD) evaluates sensors and algorithms for use in a multi-sensor multi-platform airborne detection modality. A large dataset of hyperspectral and radar imagery exists from the four major data collections performed at U. S. Army temperate and and testing facilities in Autumn 2002, Spring 2003, Summer 2004, and Summer 2005. There are a number of algorithm developers working on single-sensor algorithms in order to optimize feature and classifier selection for that sensor type. However, a given sensor/algorithm system has an absolute limitation based on the physical phenomena that system is capable of sensing. Therefore, we perform decision-level fusion of the outputs from single-channel algorithms and we choose to combine systems whose information is complementary across operating conditions. That way, the final fused system will be robust to a variety of conditions, which is a critical property of a countermine detection system. In this paper, we present the analysis of fusion algorithms on data from a sensor suite consisting of high frequency radar imagery combined with hyperspectral long-wave infrared sensor imagery. The main type of fusion being considered is Choquet integral fusion. We evaluate performance achieved using the Choquet integral method for sensor fusion versus Boolean and soft "and," or," mean, or majority voting.