A new approach to airborne mine detection scheme using a magnetic gradiometer

This paper proposes a new approach to improving the 2-D mine detection scheme utilizing an airborne system such as a blimp. At Kyushu University, a mine detection system using a blimp has been developed. A magnetic gradiometer is appropriate for land mines including ferromagnetic material. Effective observation signals such as Amplitude Analytic Signal are applicable to the detection of any anomalies in mine field. However, a sensor is exposed to electromagnetic noises caused by other metallic devices onboard, and its performance is very sensitive to the location of a sensor on the blimp. Therefore, this study proposes a technique to obtain the planar positions of land mines from the original data with observation noises. In the proposed scheme, the magnitude of dipole magnetic induction is estimated assuming that dipoles are buried in all the grid points over which magnetic gradient data are obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical simulations and indoor experiments.