UAV-based detection of landmines using infrared thermography

Abstract: Landmines remain a pervasive threat in conflict-affected regions worldwide, exacting a toll on innocent lives. Shockingly, every 95 minutes, another individual becomes a victim of these lethal explosive devices (Landmines Monitor 2022 2022), with a significant proportion being innocent civilians. Current methods for landmine detection suffer from inefficiency, high costs, and risks to the operator and system integrity. In this paper, we present a novel, efficient, safe, and cost-effective approach to unearth these hidden dangers. Our proposed method integrates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a thermal camera to capture high-resolution images of minefields. These images are subsequently transmitted to a base computer, where a state-of-the-art image processing algorithm is applied to identify the presence of landmines. Notably, our solution performs exceptionally well, particularly during evening hours, achieving an impressive detection accuracy of nearly 88%. These results exhibit great promise when compared to existing methods constrained by their design limitations.