A review of satellite and airborne sensors for remote sensing based detection of minefields and landmines

This paper focuses on the use of space and airborne sensors that can be applied to detect landmines and minefields. First the landmine and minefield problem is addressed and examples of the use of remote sensing images are presented that could provide valuable information for the mine action process and assist in conventional minefield and landmine detection methods. This is followed by an overview on relevant (declassified) aspects related to strategic overhead detection techniques developed by the military/intelligence community as well as those of civilian space and airborne remote sensing programmes. The airborne sensing techniques describe the state of the art of sensors such as optical (film, multi- and hyperspectral sensors), thermal infrared as well as microwave sensors and their suitability--limitations for remote sensing based minefield and landmine detection purposes.     

Degree of familiarity ART2 in knowledge-based landmine detection

The self-organizing network ART2 is extended to provide a fuzzy output value, which indicates the degree of familiarity of a new analog input pattern to previously stored patterns in the long-term memory of the network. The outputs of the multilayer perceptron and this modified ART2, provide an analog value to a fuzzy rule-based fusion technique which also uses a processed polarization resolved image as its third input. In real-time situations these two classifier outputs indicate the likelihood of a surface landmine target when presented with a number of multispectral and textural bands. Due to the modifications in ART2 this updated alternative architecture has improved real-time landmine detection capabilities although the registration of all bands is more critical to the accuracy of results in this case. The real-time fuzzy rule-based system in preliminary tests has detected two of the three landmines and the landmine surrogate with two false alarms. Advanced tests on 30 images using the fuzzy rule-based system further confirmed the distinct advantages of fusion and improved detection rates.     

Detecting and locating landmine fields from vehicle- and air-borne measured IR Images

Air- and vehicle-borne sensor-based technique is a potentially attractive approach for fast detecting landmines and locating landmine fields towards humanitarian demining. For images measured from airborne and vehicle-borne cameras, landmines may be indicated by direct or indirect signs, e.g., spatial difference from their surroundings due to digging or, due to thermal and material signatures. The background in images usually consists of various types of noise and clutter, e.g., thermal noise, sand, gravel road and vegetation, thus making the detection even more difficult. This paper is focused on the following aspects: (1) Finding a robust detector that is suitable for detecting/locating landmine candidates and man-made landmarks by using infrared images measured from vehicle- or air-borne sensors; (2) Interpreting the detector using the 2D isotropic bandpass filter, matched filter, detection theory and thermodynamic-based landmine models; (3) Extending the detector to a multiscale version where landmine detectability is enhanced by automatically selecting a proper scale and localization is improved by inter-scale position tracing. We propose a special type of isotropic feature detector that exploits the characteristic difference between landmines and their surroundings in the spatial-frequency domain under the multiscale framework. Experiments were performed on several infrared images measured from vehicle-borne sensors as well as airborne sensors on a helicopter over the test bed scenarios. The performance of the detector was also evaluated in terms of detectability, localization, and automatic scale selection of the detector. These results and evaluations have shown the effectiveness of the method and its potential in landmine field detection.     

Detecting people in dense crowds

We propose a scheme to detect individuals in any image frame of a video sequence showing densely crowded scenes against cluttered backgrounds. The method uses only spatial information, and in an initial pass through the image a trained Viola–Jones-type local detector is used to locate individuals in the densely crowded scene. This yields a large number of false alarms. Hence, in a second step, we seek to reduce the false alarms, and propose two methods for this. In the first, color information from the initially detected windows is passed to a classifier to reduce the false alarms. This classifier consists of a cascade of boosted classifiers with Haar-like features as input and is trained with color information from local windows. In the second method, a weak perspective model of an uncalibrated camera is used to further reduce the false alarm rate while maintaining the detection rate. This is based on the size and locations of the detections in the image frame, without the use of any 3D world information. Results are presented in the form of receiver operating characteristic curves. For instance, at a 79.0% detection accuracy, the false alarm rate is 20.3%.     

高分辨率光学遥感影像舰船检测算法研究

针对传统舰船检测方法在高分辨率光学遥感影像中虚警率较高的问题,提出了一种适用于高分辨率光学遥感影像的舰船检测算法。利用能够表征地物纹理特征的二维图像熵结合区域生长原理实现海陆分离,在舰船目标分割阶段,引入视觉显著性模型,解决了不能分割暗极性舰船目标的问题,大部分场景下分割精度较高。最后在分割出的候选目标中,采用多特征量综合的方法剔除虚警。结果表明,该算法在舰船目标检测中有较高的检测率和较低的虚警率。     

Characterization of Sky‐region Morphological‐temporal Airborne Collision Detection

Automated airborne collision‐detection systems are a key enabling technology for facilitating the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the national airspace. These safety‐critical systems must be sensitive enough to provide timely warnings of genuine airborne collision threats, but not so sensitive as to cause excessive false alarms. Hence, an accurate characterization of detection and false‐alarm sensitivity is essential for understanding performance tradeoffs, and system designers can exploit this characterization to help achieve a desired balance in system performance. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate a sky‐region, image‐based, aircraft collision‐detection system that is based on morphological and temporal processing techniques. (Note that the examined detection approaches are not suitable for the detection of potential collision threats against a ground clutter background.) A novel collection methodology for collecting realistic airborne collision‐course target footage in both head‐on and tail‐chase engagement geometries is described. Under (hazy) blue sky conditions, our proposed system achieved detection ranges greater than 1540 m in three flight test cases with no false‐alarm events in 14.14 h of nontarget data (under cloudy conditions, the system achieved detection ranges greater than 1170 m in four flight test cases with no false‐alarm events in 6.63 h of nontarget data). Importantly, this paper is the first documented presentation of detection range versus false‐alarm curves generated from airborne target and nontarget image data. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

利用高斯混合模型的SAR图像目标CFAR检测新方法

SAR（合成孔径雷达）图像杂波分布模型种类繁多且对实际地物的建模能力有限。在使用基于杂波统计模型的CFAR(恒虚警率)算法对SAR图像进行目标检测时,杂波统计模型的失配会导致检测结果产生较大的CFAR损失,算法精度不高。提出了一种基于高斯混合模型的CFAR检测新方法。该方法以理论上可以拟合任意形状概率密度分布的高斯混合模型对实际SAR图像的背景杂波进行拟合,利用拟合后得到的分布模型,根据CFAR检测的原理推导出目标检测阈值的计算公式完成目标的检测。新方法对服从不同分布模型的背景杂波,使用形式上统一的模型进行描述,克服了CFAR检测高度依赖背景杂波分布的缺点,提高了CFAR的通用性。实验结果表明,即使在背景杂波类型未知的情况下,新方法依然得到了良好的目标检测效果。     

A Back-propagation Neural Network Landmine Detector Using the Delta-technique and S-statistic

Landmines are a major problem facing the world today; there are millions of these deadly weapons still buried in various countries around the world. Humanitarian organizations dedicate an immeasurable amount of time, effort, and money to find and remove as many of these mines as possible. Unfortunately, landmines can be made out of common materials which make the correct detection of them very difficult. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of combining certain statistical techniques with a neural network to improve detection. The detection method must not only detect the majority of landmines in the ground, it must also filter out as many of the false alarms as possible. This is the true challenge to developing landmine detection algorithms. Our approach combines a Back-Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) with statistical techniques and compares the performance of mine detection against the performance of the energy detector and the δ-technique. Our results show that the combination of the δ-technique and the S-statistics with a neural network improves the performance.     

基于图像纹理的印刷缺陷检测

针对传统点对点印刷缺陷检测存在经常误报的情况,提出了一种基于图像纹理的印刷缺陷检测模型,该模型经实验证明,具有稳定性高,误报率少的优点。     

A novel low false alarm rate pedestrian detection framework based on single depth images

Pedestrian detection is an important image understanding problem with many potential applications. There has been little success in creating an algorithm which exhibits a high detection rate while keeping the false alarm in a relatively low rate. This paper presents a method designed to resolve this problem. The proposed method uses the Kinect or any similar type of sensors which facilitate the extraction of a distinct foreground. Then potential regions, which are candidates for the presence of human(s), are detected by employing the widely used Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) technique, which performs well in terms of good detection rates but suffers from significantly high false alarm rates. Our method applies a sequence of operations to eliminate the false alarms produced by the HOG detector based on investigating the fine details of local shape information. Local shape information can be identified by efficient utilization of the edge points which, in this work, are used to formulate the so called Shape Context (SC) model. The proposed detection framework is divided in four sequential stages, with each stage aiming at refining the detection results of the previous stage. In addition, our approach employs a pre-evaluation stage to pre-screen and restrict further detection results. Extensive experimental results on the dataset created by the authors, involves 673 images collected from 11 different scenes, demonstrate that the proposed method eliminates a large percentage of the false alarms produced by the HOG pedestrian detector.     

一种基于自适应背景杂波模型的宽幅SAR图像CFAR舰船检测算法

利用海洋宽幅SAR图像进行大范围海域舰船检测在海洋监视、军事侦察等方面具有重要应用。由于海况的复杂性,宽幅SAR图像背景杂波特性随海域不同而变化。采用双参数CFAR检测算法和基于K分布CFAR检测算法在处理宽幅SAR图像时,由于在待检测的所有区域采用同种背景杂波模型,导致使用的杂波模型在不适应区域失配,使CFAR检测性能下降。针对这个问题,提出了一种基于自适应背景杂波模型的CFAR宽幅SAR图像舰船检测算法,该算法通过背景窗口的多尺度统计方差判断目标所处的杂波环境,自适应选择对应的背景杂波分布模型,最后根据已知的恒虚警率及选择的杂波概率密度函数进行CFAR检测。对20多幅宽幅SAR图像进行了试验,实验结果表明:该算法在检测精度上有明显的改善。     

基于聚类的SAR图像快速目标检测

针对SAR图像目标检测效率低、虚警概率高及SAR图像的特点,改进了Mean Shift聚类算法,并与双参数CFAR检测技术相结合,提出了一种能够快速而准确的SAR图像目标检测算法。通过聚类预处理SAR图像,降低了背景杂波对目标检测的影响及检测的虚警率,并且聚类后的SAR图像具有一定的结构,将图像结构的概念引入到目标检测中,避免了对图像逐点检测,大大提高了检测速度。实验结果表明,该方法具有检测速度快、虚警概率低的特点。     

Robust scale invariant target detection using the scale-space theory and optimization for IRST

This paper presents a new small target detection method using scale invariant feature. Detecting small targets whose sizes are varying is very important to automatic target detection in infrared search and track (IRST). The conventional spatial filtering methods with fixed sized kernel show limited target detection performance for incoming targets. The scale invariant target detection can be defined as searching for maxima in the 3D (x, y, and scale) representation of an image with the Laplacian function. The scale invariant feature can detect different sizes of targets robustly. Experimental results with real FLIR images show higher detection rate and lower false alarm rate than conventional methods. Furthermore, the proposed method shows very low false alarms in scan-based IR images than conventional filters.     

Performance assessment for generalized delay-timers in alarm configuration

False and nuisance alarms are major problems in the process industry. Generalized delay-timer is an effective technique to improve the performance of an alarm system. However, due to the increasing intermediate states, computation of the performance indices, false alarm rate (FAR), missed alarm rate (MAR) and expected detection delay (EDD), is hard and unsolved for generalized delay timer. In this paper, we first propose general formulae to compute FAR and MAR by adequately reconsidering the internal relationship between the no-alarm state and the alarm state. Then the computation of EDD is discussed via the probability of alarm or no-alarm at one sample by iteration. Simulation and industrial results show that alarm performance can be improved via generalized delay-timer with proper choice of the order.     

基于最弱前置条件的静态分析误报消除技术

针对程序静态分析技术误报过多的问题,提出一种基于最弱前置条件的静态分析误报消除方法。根据不同的软件安全性质,从目标状态出发,以需求驱动的方式得到过程起始位置的最弱前置条件,判断该条件公式的可满足性来消除误报。将该方法实例化来消除静态分析工具检测数组访问越界和空指针解引用的误报,实验结果表明该方法是有效且实用的。     

Trainable blotch detection on high resolution archive films minimizing the human interaction

Film archives are continuously in need of automatic restoration tools to accelerate the correction of film artifacts and to decrease the costs. Blotches are a common type of film degradation and their correction needs a lot of manual interaction in traditional systems due to high false detection rates and the huge amount of data of high resolution images. Blotch detectors need reliable motion estimation to avoid the false detection of uncorrupted regions. In case of erroneous detection, usually an operator has to remove the false alarms manually, which significantly decreases the efficiency of the restoration process. To reduce manual intervention, we developed a two-step false alarm reduction technique including pixel- and object-based methods as post-processing. The proposed pixel-based algorithm compensates motion, decreasing false alarms at low computational cost, while the following object based method further reduces the residual false alarms by machine learning techniques. We introduced a new quality metric for detection methods by measuring the required amount of manual work after the automatic detection. In our novel evaluation technique, the ground truth is collected from digitized archive sequences where defective pixel positions are detected in an interactive process.     

Alarm effectiveness in driver-centred collision-warning systems

The potential use of systems that seek to communicate a warning of impending collision directly to the driver is examined. Technological advances in collisionwarning systems include reliable, low-cost radars, sensors with low noise levels, and the development of accurate detection algorithms for particular crash types, e.g. rearend collisions. However, fundamental practical constraints make perfect sensor detection difficult to achieve. Imperfect detection conflates the false alarm rate and experience with other technologies confirms driver aversion to false warnings. Although sensitive alarm systems with high detection rates and low false alarm rates have been developed, the posterior probability of a collision given an alarm can be quite low because of the low base rate of collision events. As a result, only a small proportion of alarms will represent true collision scenarios. These and other factors can conspire to reduce alarm effectiveness in collision-warning systems. The problem is illustrated analytically and potential solutions are advanced.     

基于Canny边缘SURF特征的红外与可见光图像配准算法

利用多源传感器之间获取信息的互补性,克服单传感器的缺陷,从而提高系统整体性能指标的思想已经在军事、医疗、卫星等领域获得了广泛的应用。可见光和红外图像相融合也能提高视觉应用场景中对目标的探测能力,降低目标警报的虚警率和漏警率,提升准确率和工作效益。对于红外与可见光图像配准过程中受不同传感器图像成像原理不同,成像结果图像灰度差异大、特征难以匹配的问题,可以利用红外和可见光图像的共有特征即边缘轮廓特征,采用Canny边缘提取算法提取出图像最基本、稳定的特征,然后在边缘图中使用SURF特征检测算法进行特征点提取与匹配,最后采用RANSAC进行精准匹配。由于边缘在红外和可见光图像中都是比较稳定的特征,而且在边缘轮廓图中进行特征提取将极大减少计算量和提高匹配率,因而最终能够获得较为准确的红外、可见光图像的变换关系。     

A target detection algorithm for SAR images based on regional probability statistics and saliency analysis

In comparison with optical images, a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image has many defects, such as low resolution, strong noise interference and random distribution of the target, which increases the false alarm rate of traditional detection methods. To improve the detection accuracy of the SAR image, a novel detection method is proposed based on regional probability statistics and saliency analysis. A saliency analysis model based on dense and sparse reconstruction (DSR) is reconstructed to locate the target precisely. Firstly, the regional probability of the SAR image is estimated to extract the background region. And then, the extracted background sub-blocks are clustered and employed to replace the corresponding background template set of the DSR model. Subsequently, the reconstructed DSR model is used to extract the target, and the detection accuracy of the proposed method is enhanced greatly. Compared with the constant false alarm rate (CFAR)-based detection method, the proposed method can achieve a high detection accuracy and protect the edges of the SAR image.     

A ground system for early forest fire detection based on infrared signal processing

This article presents a ground remote automatic system for forest surveillance based on infrared signal processing applied to early fire detection. Advanced techniques, which are based on infrared signal processing, are used in order to process the captured images. With the aim of determining the presence or absence of fire, the system performs the fusion of different detectors that exploit different expected characteristics of a real fire, such as persistence and increase. Theoretical simulations and practical results are presented to corroborate the control of the probability of false alarm. Results in a real environment are also presented to authenticate the accuracy of the operation of the proposed system. In particular, some experiments have been done to evaluate the delay of the system (tens of seconds on average) in detecting a controlled ground fire in a range of 1–10 km. Moreover, temporary evolution of false alarms and true detections are presented to evaluate the long-term performance of the system in a real environment. We have reached a detection probability of 100% at a false alarm rate of around 1?×?10^?9.