Progress in LIBS for landmine detection

摘要

The ability to interrogate objects buried in soil and ascertain their chemical composition in-situ would be an important capability enhancement for both military and humanitarian demining. Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) is a simple spark spectrochemical technique using a pulsed laser. Recent developments in broadband and man-portable LIBS provide the capability for the real-time detection at very high sensitivity of all elements in any target material because all chemical elements emit in the 200-940 nm spectral region. This technological advance offers a unique potential for the development of a rugged and reliable man-portable or robot-deployable chemical sensor that would be capable of both in-situ point probing and chemical sensing for landmine detection. Broadband LIBS data was acquired under laboratory conditions for more than a dozen different types of anti-personnel and anti-tank landmine casings from four countries plus a set of antitank landmine simulants. Subsequently, a statistical classification technique (partial least squares discriminant analysis, PLS-DA) was used to discriminate landmine casings from the simulants and to assign "unknown" spectra to a mine type based upon a library classification approach. Overall, a correct classification success of 99.0% was achieved, with a misclassification rate of only 1.8%. This performance illustrates the potential that LIBS has to be developed into a field-deployable device that could be utilized as a confirmatory sensor in landmine detection. The operational concept envisioned is a small LIBS system that is either man-portable or robot-deployed in which a micro-laser is contained in the handle of a deminer's probe, with laser light delivered and collected through an optical fiber in the tapered tip of the probe. In such a configuration, chemical analysis could be readily accomplished by LIBS after touching the buried object that one is interested in identifying and using real-time statistical signal processing techniques to accomplish "mine/no-mine" discrimination and even object identification if a material library could be constructed prior to analysis.