Anti-personnel Mine Detection and Classication Using GPR Image

Md. Alauddin Bhuiyan and Baikunth Nath Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering The University of Melbourne VIC 3010, Australia Email: {bhuiyanm, bnath}@csse.unimelb.edu.au Abstract
The Automated Anti-personnel Mine (APM) detection and classication is currently a broad issue. The detection success depends on the feature selection that we obtain from the sensors. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is one of the established sensors for detecting buried APM. In this paper, we introduce a method which improves the accuracy of detecting APM by using GPR imaging. This method adopts a segmentation technique for feature extraction and Neural Network as a pattern classier. A seeded region growing algorithm is applied as region based segmentation for pattern construction following the Median ltering and Threshold of the original GPR image. A feed forward neural network (FFNN) with backpropagation training is employed for classifying the patterns. The FFNN takes the patterns (APM signature) that are constructed from each salient region and generate the classication. This method signicantly improves accuracy in the detection and classication of APM.

1. Introduction
The large numbers of landmines buried in the soil are causing enormous problems in huge areas throughout the world today. There are about ten billion mines buried in eighty countries [10]. Detection and classication of buried APM which are small in size (60 to 120mm in diameter and 40 to 70 mm in thickness) and containing a little metal offers considerable challenges. Plastic APM has dielectric properties, which makes it similar to that soil and the reection from the mine is usually weak and masked by its background. Sophisticated sensors like GPR also sometimes fail to capture the mine signature properly. Moreover, manual demining suffers from large number of false alarms leading to huge time requirement for an average mine clearance. So, an automated system is immensely necessary for the enhancement of detecting and classifying buried APMs.

In general, a buried object can be detected by scanning the ground surface with the radar probe. The presence of an object is detected by checking for interruption through the round trip path of the signal. GPR detects any object below the soil surface if it differs from the surroundings medium in the conductivity (metallic substance), the permittivity or the dielectric constant (plastic/non-conducting targets), or the permeability (ferrous metals) [6]. GPR data can be represented in three different forms; A-scan, B-scan, and C-scan where a single trace in the surface is A-scan (one dimensional or 1-D), collection of A-scans is B-scan (2-D) and if we consider depth with B-scan then it is known as C-scan (3-D). An object whose size is comparable with a typical wavelength (0.1m @1 GHz) gives rise to a complex reection pattern consisting of a superposition of inverted hyperbolic arcs in three dimensions (3-D) [3]. Present GPR imaging based mine detection techniques have been adopting ltering, image processing/segmentation and classication methods. Popular ltering techniques for GPR image enhancement are Alternate sequential lter (ASF), Morphological contrast enhancement and Histogram equalization algorithm [7]. Gray scale Morphology, Semi-automatic segmentation and Focusing algorithms have been applied in the image processing part [7][4][11]. Mine targets are classied with shape based signatures (of mine) i.e., hyperbolic arcs by applying Hough transformation [3], extracting mine features by KarhunenLoeve transformation (KLT) and Kittler-Young transformation (KYT) [7] and region based using Dempster-Shafer (DS) method [6]. We propose a method for classifying mines that uses mine signature captured by GPR as a pattern. We know that the buried objects size and particle inuences the prole of the signature in GPR image [2]. Based on this we capture the GPR signature for our mine/non-mine pattern. Each GPR image which is obtained from mine surface has one or more signatures from these we consider the prominent signature(s) as our pattern(s). At rst we apply Median ltering to enhance the prominent features in the image and

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then we apply the threshold technique based on the image histogram. The thresholded image is considered for feature extraction. We performed this by applying Seeded region growing algorithm from which we calculate the prominent region. From these prominent regions we construct the patterns suitable for feeding into the Neural Network. Using these patterns we trained the Neural Network to classify the object into a mine or not mine. Our proposed method is based on training patterns which are obtained from the image constructed from the GPR data. This paper is structured as follows: In section 2, we outline our proposed method illustrating image processing techniques used here and the Feed Forward Neural Network as classier. Section 3 provides the results. Concluding remarks are given in Section 4, and nally, Section 5 discusses direction for future work.

Figure 1. The proposed system for automated APM detection

2.1.1

Median Filtering

2. The Proposed Method

Our proposed method is designed in three stages. First stage is image preprocessing where we apply the conversion technique of original color image to a grayscale image, and then apply the Median ltering and Threshold technique to those obtained grayscale images. The second stage is image segmentation and pattern construction where we apply seeded region growing segmentation algorithm. Then for each salient region we construct a pattern which we call as the mine pattern. The third and nal stage is the classication of mine where we train the Feed Forward Neural Network using these patterns and obtain our ultimate target classication.

Median ltering is a non linear smoothing method that reduces the blurring of edges, in which the idea is to replace the current point in the image by the median of the brightnesses in its neighborhood. The median of the brightnesses in the neighborhood is not affected by individual noise spikes and so median smoothing eliminates impulse noise quite well [9]. Further, as the Median ltering does not blur edges much, we applied it iteratively for image smoothing (Figure 2). 2.1.2 Intensity Histogram

2.1

Preprocessing

Image histogram is a graph showing the number of pixels in an image at each different intensity value found in that image. It is one of the most convenient ways of obtaining global information of an image. We calculate the histogram of each 8-bit grayscale image (256 different possible intensities) and analyze it to nd the peak of the mine patterns (Figure 3). Then we proceed with the image threshold technique. 2.1.3 Thresholding

We collected the original color GPR images from DeTeC- Demining Technology Center at the EPFL, Switzerland. The images are in .gif format and are stored as 512x98 pixels. We downloaded a total of nine images and converted those into grayscale images. We implemented the conversion and the overall system in MATLAB programming environment. The conversion technique is as follows: change image colormap into NTSC coordinates, and sets the hue and saturation components to zero creating a gray colormap. Replace the indices in the image with the corresponding grayscale intensity values in the gray colormap. After this conversion we apply the Median ltering to the gray scale images for removing the noise and then apply the Threshold technique to those ltered images by analyzing corresponding images intensity histogram for enhancing the segmentation.

We apply threshold to the gray scale images and ultimately transformed those into two valued gray scale images. The technique is, for an input image f thresholding produces the output image G as follows: G(i, j) = 0 f or f (i, j) <= T = 255 f or f (i, j) > T

(1)

2.2

Seeded Region Growing Segmentation

It is a region growing procedure that groups pixels or sub regions into larger regions based on seed points. The basic approach is to start with a set of seed points and from these grow regions by appending to each seed those neighboring

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Figure 2. The original GPR image (left)and ltered image (right)

pixels that have predened properties similar to the seed [5]. Here we set the property of seeds gray level intensity value as zero and apply the stopping rule, growing a region should stop when no more pixels satisfy the criteria for inclusion in that region. In the region growing process each region is labeled with a unique number. The image is scanned in a row-wise manner until its end, and each pixel that satises our criteria is taken into account for growing a region with its 8-neighborhood connectivity.

Figure 3. Filtered GPR image (top left) and its Histogram (top right). Thresholded Image (bottom left) and next two are segmented (salient) regions which have been selected for pattern construction

2.3

Pattern Construction

After completion of the segmentation, we consider each region which belongs to a sufcient number of pixels (compared with a threshold value) and then construct pattern with that region. Each selected region is converted into a 2-D image which we call a pattern. We accomplish this by assigning the real value of the region (in our case it is 0) and the rest of pixels intensities (seen as background) as 255. For each region we calculate the minimum to maximum row and column values. Thus, we construct a unique pattern in any situation for a particular mine. Finally, we convert it into a 1-D pattern row-wise for feeding it into the Neural Network.

The network output y classies patterns [8] whether it is a mine or not.

m n

y=

(
i=1

wi fi (
j=1

wij xj ))

(3)

where fi , i = 1, 2,, m and f denote the activation functions of the hidden neurons and the output neuron, respectively, wi , i = 1, 2, ,m and wij , i = 1 ,2,, m, j = 1, 2,, n denote the weights connected to the output neuron and to the hidden layer neurons, respectively. The output activation function is a unipolar sigmoidal and the hidden layer activation functions take the form of hyperbolic tangent sigmoidal.

2.4

Feed Forward Neural Network

Results

Neural network is the computational technique inspired by biological neurons with the ability to adapt or learn, to generalize and to cluster or organize data. We have used two layers FFNN as a classier: an input layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. The FFNN is fully connected and has been trained with back-propagation algorithm. For a neural network with n input nodes, if the input to node j is xj , xj = I(j) (2)

where I = I[1, 2,, j,, n] and n is length of the pattern. The NN has one hidden layer of m units and one output neuron.

We constructed a total of 21 patterns with different sizes, the maximum size being 3024 pixels and the minimum size being 1212 pixels. We considered the length of the 1-D patterns as the length of the maximum size. Thus, the xed length of each pattern is maintained by lling up with 1s (for each empty position) following the sequence. Figure 4 represents the three patterns (enlarged) taken from the original set of 21 patterns. For the FFNN we have used 16 patterns for training and the remaining 5 for testing. The FFNN converged in less than 5000 iterations. The recognition rate on the testing set was 100%. We also performed tests on synthetic patterns

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Figure 4. Three patterns with different sizes and shapes. Pattern 1) 2021 pixels (left), 2) 1716 pixels (center) and 3) 1212 pixels

using the trained FFNN and the results produced are consistent. The available average APM detection and classication rate, for controlled experiments, is currently about 80% [1]. We have used the data from the same source and have achieved better results. Our system should be more reliable if we have sufcient real eld data from GPR (for example, about thousand GPR images to construct patterns).

Concluding Remarks

This paper proposes a new and efcient technique for the detection and classication of Anti-Personnel Mine (APM). We have worked with GPR images and using our approach achieved almost 100% accuracy. Our proposed system has attained the detection goal which is highly signicant in the anti-personnel mine detection and clearance eld. Moreover, our proposed technique is likely to work consistently and reliably (based on the characteristics of neural network) with sufcient data being available from the actual mine elds.

[3] L. Capineiri, P. Falorni, and C. Windsor. Buried mine classication from three-dimensional radar data. Insight, vol. 44(12), pp. 759-764, 2002. [4] G. N. Crisp and A. J. Hill. Humanitarian multi-sensor handheld mine detector: design of a gpr array. Proceedings of the SPIE, Detection and Remediation Technologies for Mines and Minelike Targets VII, vol. 4742, pp. 1029-1037, 2002. [5] R. C. Gonzalez, R. E. Woods, and S. L. Eddins. Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB. Prentice Hall, 2004. [6] N. Milisavljevic, I. Bloch, S. V. D. Broek, and M. Acheroy. Improving mine recognition through processing and dempester-shafer fusion of ground-penetrating radar data. The journal of pattern recognition society, vol. 36, pp. 12331250, 2003. [7] J. Paik, C. P. Lee, and M. A. Abidi. Image processing-based mine detection techniques: A review. Subsurface Sensing Technologies and Applications, vol. 3, pp. 153-201, 2002. [8] B. D. Ripley. Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks. Cambridge University Press, 1996. [9] M. Sonka, V. Hlavac, and R. Boyle. Image Processing, Analysis and Machine Vision, Second Edition. PWS, 1998. [10] R. Wu, J. Liu, Q. Gao, H. Li, and B. Zhang. Progress in the research of ground bounce removal for landmine detection with ground penetrating radar. In the proceedings of Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium, 2005(in press). [11] J. Zhang, L. Qun, and B. Nath. Image segmentation based on competitive learning. Journal of marine science and Application, vol. 3, pp. 71-74,2004.

Future work

Our proposed system only classies patterns into mine and non-mine classes. Our future goal, therefore, is to train the network in a way that it can determine the mine types as well. We are in the process of setting up experiments with the aim to collect large amount of real data. Results for the real time mine clearance will be reported later.

References
[1] G. Alli, C. Bonopera, A. Sarri, G. Pinelli, and G. D. Pasquale. Data processing for mine-detection polarimetric ground penetrating radar array. In the proceedings of Tenth International Conference on Ground Penetrating Radar, pp. 1-4, Delft, The Netherlands, 2004. [2] C. Bruschini, B. Gros, F. Guerne, P. Y. Piece, and O. Carmona. Ground penetrating radar and imaging metal detector for antipersonnel mine detection. Journal of Applied Geophysics, vol. 40, pp. 59-71, 1998.

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