On the confidence level fusion of IR and forward-looking GPR

We consider in this paper the improvement of side-attack mine detection by performing confidence level fusion with data collected from vehicle-mounted forward-looking IR and GPR (FL-GPR) sensors. The mine detection system is vehicle based, and has both IR and FL-GPR sensors mounted on the top of the vehicle. The IR images and FL-GPR data are captured as the vehicle moves forward. The detections from IR images are obtained from the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Morphological Shared-Weight Neural Networks (MSNN) depending on target characteristics, and those from FL-GPR are derived from the FL-GPR SAR images through object-tracking. Since the IR and FL-GPR alarms do not occur at the same location, the fusion process begins with each IR alarm and looks at the nearby FL-GPR alarms with confidences weighted by values that are inversely proportional to their distances to the IR alarm. The FL-GPR alarm with the highest weighted confidence is selected and combined with the IR confidence through geometric mean. An experimental dataset collected from a government test site is used for performance evaluation. At the highest Pd and comparing with IR only, fusing IR and FL-GPR yields a reduction of FAR by 26%. When the Hough transform is applied to reject the IR alarms that have irregular shapes, the fusion results provides a reduction of FAR by 35% at the highest Pd.