Investigations on anti-personnel mine detection using microwave radiometers

Many million anti-personnel mines are polluting the environment in about 60 countries and cause a considerable limitation of the living space for agricultural purposes. The present mine clearance operations are much slower than the mine laying operations. Therefore the principal goals of a mine detection system designer must be focused on the following key requirements: 1) The system should be capable of detecting small surface and subsurface plastic mines with very low metal content under most environmental conditions, 2) the detection probability should be maximised and the false alarm rate minimised, 3) the hardware expense should be as most cost-effective as possible. The optimum solution is the use of multiple sensors, e.g. metal detectors, ground penetrating radars, microwave radiometers, based on different physical phenomena and on data fusion. In this paper we give an overview on relevant physical phenomenology and on our past work in investigating passive microwave sensors for mine detection purposes as a possible contribution to a multi-sensor system. We present experimental equipment and corresponding illustrative measurements results