Significance of buried object orientation variation in their detection using thermography

Abstract

Landmines are part of a complex system with variable characteristics that may change with time. If thermography is applied on such a system, the most significant characteristics of resulting thermograms is overcritical noise which has severely suppressed the application of thermography for landmine detection for humanitarian demining. The attempts to realise as much as possible of the thermography potential motivated concentrating onto sources of noise in buried objects thermograms, in particular onto variations in mine orientation relative to the soil normal. The experiments reported in this paper were performed in order to investigate the influence of angle between the local vertical axis and mine symmetry axis, the angle between the local vertical axis and soil surface normal, and the object depth. The influences are quantified and ranked through the statistically planned experiment. The strongest influence is the statistical interaction of depth and angles. According to the statistical test these two combinations are significant influences. The results indicate that the application of modern thermography in humanitarian demining is to be broadened by including the variations in mine orientation.