Engineering Commons^™

Landmine Detection And Discrimination Using High-Pressure Waterjets, Daryl G. Beetner, R. Joe Stanley, Sanjeev Agarwal, Deepak R. Somasundaram, Kopal Nema, Bhargav Mantha

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Methods of locating and identifying buried landmines using high-pressure waterjets were investigated. Methods were based on the sound produced when the waterjet strikes a buried object. Three classification techniques were studied, based on temporal, spectral, and a combination of temporal and spectral approaches using weighted density distribution functions, a maximum likelihood approach, and hidden Markov models, respectively. Methods were tested with laboratory data from low-metal content simulants and with field data from inert real landmines. Results show that the sound made when the waterjet hit a buried object could be classified with a 90% detection rate and an 18% false …