Post-conflict landmines have serious humanitarian repercussions: landmines cost lives, limbs and land.
The primary method used to locate these buried devices relies on a human listening to audio feedback from a metal detector. With this technique, the proximity of the human to the explosive device means that mistakes are potentially fatal. The presence of metallic debris in former combat areas also means that operators must discriminate landmine feedback from that induced by clutter in order to operate efficiently: in current practice, operators must stop and inspect every contact that could be a landmine, which slows down the demining process significantly. Both these challenges are exacerbated by newer landmines with minimal metallic content.
PETALS - pattern enhancement tool for assisting land mine sensing - aims to respond to these challenges and improve the demining process through the provision of assistive visual interfaces for metal detector-based landmine detection.