Landmine Detection by Passive Infrared Thermography Using Image Processing Techniques

Landmine are considered as those military weapons that when used during a war, their mission is not accomplished after the war and will always be a threatening element. Thus detection and neutralization of landmine before it causes an insident is one of the most evident examples of passive defense. On the other hand, since common methods of landmine detection face many risks, therefore selection of a method that has the lowest risk, is one of the main considerations of passive defense. Passive Infrared thermography technique which can detect buried landmines without direct contact with the soil, is one of the new and safe methods of landmine detection.In the present paper, to detect landmines, we presented a method which contains different stages of contrast stretching, image smoothing, noise reduction, image segmentation, extraction of feature image from a sequence of images and object identification. In this regard some of the image processing techniques such as linear stretching, histogram equalization, morphological filters, watershed segmentation method based on markers and Karhunen-Leove transformation have been used.