A Geometrical Feature Based Sensor Fusion Model of GPR and IR for the Detection and Classification of Anti-Personnel Mines

The Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and Infrared (IR) imaging have become two established sensors for detecting buried anti-personnel mines (APM) which contain no or a little metal. The paper introduces the GPR and IR techniques briefly and compares the two sensors with respect to their strengths and weaknesses for target detection and emphasizes the necessity of fusion to harness the advantages of each of the methods. We propose a geometrical feature based sensor fusion framework, combining GPR and IR, as an effective technique for detection and classification of APM, which will reduce the false alarm rate significantly. We consider the basic geometrical shape descriptor features of an object and construct a feature vector for each of the objects. These feature vectors are used to train a Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) for the classification of APMs. The method gives almost perfect detection accuracy.