Detection of land mines with hyperspectral data

The objective of the US Army Hyperspectral Mine Detection Phenomenology program was to determine if spectral discriminants exist that are useful for the detection of land mines. Statistically significant mine signature data were collected over a wide spectral range and analyzed to identify robust spectral features that might serve as discriminants for new airborne sensor concepts. Detection metrics which characterize the deductibility of land miens and which predict the detection performance of a general class of hyperspectral detection algorithms were selected and applied. Detection performance of land mines was analyzed against background type, age of buried miens and possible sensor design parameters. This paper describes the result of this analysis and present EO/IR hyperspectral sensor and algorithm design concepts that could potentially be used to operationally detect buried land mines.