ASTAMIDS minefield detection performance at Aberdeen Proving Ground test site

摘要

The airborne standoff minefield detection systems (ASTAMIDS) is an airborne imaging system designed for deployment as a modular mission payload on an unmanned aerial vehicle and capable of detecting surface and buried anti-tank mines under all-weather, day/night conditions. Its primary mission is to support a forward maneuver unit with real time intelligence regarding the existence and extent of minefields in their operational area. The ASTAMIDS development effort currently consists of two parallel technical approaches, passive thermal IR sensor technology in one case and an active multi-channel sensor utilizing passive thermal IR coregistered with a near IR laser polarization data for the other case. The minefield detection capability of this system is a result of signal processing of image data. Due to the large quantities of data generated by an imaging sensor even at modest speeds of an unmanned aerial vehicle, manual exploitation of this data is not feasible in a real time tactical environment and therefore computer aided target feature extraction is a necessity to provide detection cues. Our development efforts over the past several years have concentrated on mine and minefield detection algorithms, the hardware necessary to execute these algorithms in real time, and the tools with which to measure detection performance.