Improvements to the U.S. Army's AN/PSS-12 metal detector to enhance landmine discrimination capabilities

This paper briefly reviews the fundamental operating characteristics of the AN/PSS-12 and describes modifications to the system aimed toward developing the capability to distinguish buried low-metal landmines from buried metallic clutter. Improvements were implemented to three key areas including the AN/PSS-12 hardware, method of data collection at Fort A.P.Hill, VA, and algorithm design. The improvements to the AN/PSS-12 hardware yield higher system bandwidths resulting in the ability to extract the fast decay rates associated with small metallic objects. The improvements in data collection involve exciting and measuring the response of a buried object along its three principle cardinal axes resulting in an increase of characteristic target information that can be used to further separate mine responses from clutter responses. The increase in characteristic target information yields five target parameters that characterize each of the eleven different mine types in the JUXOCO grid. A generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) is developed that incorporates the five target parameters. The algorithm, using the additional target information, results in an increase in landmine discrimination performance presented in a receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve.