Using Artificial Neural Networks to Identify Unexploded Ordnance

摘要

The clearing of unexploded ordnance (UXO) is a deadly and time consuming process.The U.S. Government is currently spending millions of dollars to remove UXO's from bases that are closing around the world. Existing methods for detecting UXO's only inform the clearing team that a piece of metal is present, rather than the type of metal, either UXO, shrapnel, or garbage. A lot of time and money is spent digging up every piece of metal detected. This thesis presents the use of artificial neural networks to determine the type of UXO that is detected. A multi layered feed forward neural network using the back propagation training algorithm was developed using the language Lisp. The network was trained to recognize five pieces of ammunition. Results from the research show that four out of five pieces of ammunition from the test set were identified with an accuracy of .99 out of 1.0. The network also correctly identified that a tin can was not one of the five pieces of ammunition.