Thermographic detection of buried objects

Abstract

A great development of technologies for the detection of buried objects took place in the last years. Applications in archeology, finding of pipe lines and others were important, but most attention was paid in humanitarian detection of land mines and unexploded ordnances. Among these technologies, thermography is one of the most useful techniques and has been applied concurrent with other ones (Ground Penetrating Radar, Electromagnetic Induction, etc.) We have made several experiments to obtain thermographic images of buried objects in the middle and far infrared, in laboratory and in field, and in different types of terrain: naked ground, ground covered with grass and sand. We employed, as warming methods, natural sun radiation and blowing of warm air or halogen lamps. We have used metallic and dielectric objects of different sizes and shapes so as to recognize them by their characteristics. The acquired images were improved using noise reduction and image enhancement techniques. In this work we present the thermographic images obtained. All measurements were made at short distance, less than 100 cm, as the objective of our work is to develop a thermographic imaging system for the detection of buried objects to be installed in an autonomous ground robot.© (2005) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.