Positioning System for a Hand-Held Mine Detector

Humanitarian mine clearance aims at reducing the nuisance of regions infected by explosive devices. These devices need to be detected with a high rate of success while keeping a low false alarm rate to reduce time losses and personnel’s fatigue. This chapter describes a positioning system developed to track hand-held detector movements in the context of close-range mine detection. With such a system, the signals captured by the detector over time can be used to build twoor three-dimensional data. The objects possibly present in the data can then be visually appreciated by an operator to detect specific features such as shape or size or known signatures. The positioning system developed in the framework of the HOPE European project requires only a camera and an extra bar. It adds few constraints to current mine clearance procedures and requires limited additional hardware. The software developed for calibration and continuous acquisition of the position is described, and evaluation results are presented.