"Antipersonnel mines can have many shapes," said Dimitri M. Donskoy, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., who has developed one of the new mine detection systems.
The autonomous mine detection system (shown in Figure 4) was used to acquire large collections of GPR data from two geographically distinct test sites in the eastern U.S. with natural soil.
In the rare event that one of the animals repeatedly proves itself unable to master the techniques of mine detection, it is withdrawn from training but kept on as a playmate for its more successful peers.
However, they still have trouble with the worst case mine detection scenario we assumed, where a high sea state causes the scene to be filled with moving objects of similar scale, shape, and intensity as the foreground target.
It is expected that controlled bio-systems, biotechnology and microbial techniques will contribute to the advancement of mine detection and other application domains.
Financed by a $770,000 grant from the Army Research Office, his land mine detection work has incalculable humanitarian value.
The key challenge to mine detection technology lies in achieving a high rate of mine detection while maintaining a low false alarm rate.
The performance of a mine detection system is therefore commonly measured by a receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve that specifies the rate of true detection versus the rate of false alarm.
And as of this year, the US military has already deployed some of its numerous recon and mine detection drones like the long tubes that are the Bluefin-21 and Knifefish robots in active duty and high profile missions, such as the search for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Experiments at the CUF include a land mine detection system, neutron damage testing of solid-state detectors, irradiation of human cancer cells for boron neutron capture therapy experiments and irradiation of rice to induce genetic mutations.
