Yann Yvinec

By Yann Yvinec

This chapter summarizes the experience of the Royal Military Academy in testing and evaluating new tools for mine action. It first underscores the importance of testing and evaluating new methods in general and in mine action in particular. Some recommendations are given to help the design of test protocols: defining carefully the objectives of the test and what is to be measured, the importance of blind and double‐blind tests, choosing between realism and statistical relevance, the importance of how to display the results, etc. These recommendations are illustrated by real‐life examples, mainly from test and evaluation of detectors of mines in which RMA has been involved. A test protocol is detailed. It is the one that RMA designed and used to evaluate a detector that was proven to be useless and that led to the criminal conviction of its designer in the United Kingdom. Sources of available test protocols and test reports are also listed.

Part of the book: Mine Action

By Charles Beumier and Yann Yvinec

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 two- or 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.

Part of the book: Mine Action

By Yann Yvinec, Nada Milisavljevic, Charles Beumier, Idrissa Mahamadou, Dirk Borghys, Michal Shimoni and Vinciane Lacroix

This chapter describes the research activities of the Royal Military Academy on remote sensing applied to mine action. Remote sensing can be used to detect specific features that could lead to the suspicion of the presence, or absence, of mines. Work on the automatic detection of trenches and craters is presented here. Land cover can be extracted and is quite useful to help mine action. We present here a classification method based on Gabor filters. The relief of a region helps analysts to understand where mines could have been laid. Methods to be a digital terrain model from a digital surface model are explained. The special case of multi‐spectral classification is also addressed in this chapter. Discussion about data fusion is also given. Hyper‐spectral data are also addressed with a change detection method. Synthetic aperture radar data and its fusion with optical data have been studied. Radar interferometry and polarimetry are also addressed.

Part of the book: Mine Action