Test and analysis of the detectability of personnel mines in a realistic minefield by polarization in the infrared LW region

Infrared polarization has been used to investigate how well a partly covered object can be detected. It has earlier been shown that a covered object could be detected even though it was not at all possible to see the object measured in a conventional way without a polarizer. Also a measure of how much better an object is seen in polarization than without using polarization has been defined. This has earlier been applied to trip wires and partly covered surface laid personnel mines. In this work polarization measurement has been performed on realistic minefields, that has been setup by SWEDEC in Sweden. The goal has been to investigate how many mines and trip wires can be detected with polarization measurements in the LW region. The method is working well, but the present equipment are not very effective in finding mines and trip wires.