Paper
4 May 2009 Progress in LIBS for landmine detection
Jennifer L. Gottfried, Russell S. Harmon, Aaron La Pointe
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The ability to interrogate objects buried in soil and ascertain their chemical composition in-situ would be an important capability enhancement for both military and humanitarian demining. Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) is a simple spark spectrochemical technique using a pulsed laser. Recent developments in broadband and man-portable LIBS provide the capability for the real-time detection at very high sensitivity of all elements in any target material because all chemical elements emit in the 200-940 nm spectral region. This technological advance offers a unique potential for the development of a rugged and reliable man-portable or robot-deployable chemical sensor that would be capable of both in-situ point probing and chemical sensing for landmine detection. Broadband LIBS data was acquired under laboratory conditions for more than a dozen different types of anti-personnel and anti-tank landmine casings from four countries plus a set of antitank landmine simulants. Subsequently, a statistical classification technique (partial least squares discriminant analysis, PLS-DA) was used to discriminate landmine casings from the simulants and to assign "unknown" spectra to a mine type based upon a library classification approach. Overall, a correct classification success of 99.0% was achieved, with a misclassification rate of only 1.8%. This performance illustrates the potential that LIBS has to be developed into a field-deployable device that could be utilized as a confirmatory sensor in landmine detection. The operational concept envisioned is a small LIBS system that is either man-portable or robot-deployed in which a micro-laser is contained in the handle of a deminer's probe, with laser light delivered and collected through an optical fiber in the tapered tip of the probe. In such a configuration, chemical analysis could be readily accomplished by LIBS after touching the buried object that one is interested in identifying and using real-time statistical signal processing techniques to accomplish "mine/no-mine" discrimination and even object identification if a material library could be constructed prior to analysis.
© (2009) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Jennifer L. Gottfried, Russell S. Harmon, and Aaron La Pointe "Progress in LIBS for landmine detection", Proc. SPIE 7303, Detection and Sensing of Mines, Explosive Objects, and Obscured Targets XIV, 73031F (4 May 2009); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.818286
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CITATIONS
Cited by 2 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy

Land mines

Mining

Sensors

Principal component analysis

Statistical modeling

Calcium

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