Proposal for analog synthesis of a land mine detection system

The detection of buried landmines is an important problem in regions where an army conflict has occurred. In particular, antipersonnel plastic mines cannot be detected with classical techniques, such as metal detectors. So a very promising detection technique based on a thermal model of the soil is applied to detect this kind of mines, in which infrared (IR) images of the soil are used. The core of this technique is the solution of the heat transfer process in the soil and at the soil-air interface, which is a very time consuming process. To overcome this problem we propose an analog circuit which can solve the equations that model the system reducing time cost by taking advantage of the inherent massive parallelism of the circuit. The description of the equations is made with VHDL--AMS and then an automatic synthesis tool generates a circuit which solves the equations.