Laser-induced acoustic landmine detection with experimental results on buried landmines

Acoustic landmine detection (ALD) is a technique for the detection of buried landmines including non-metal mines. Since it gives complementary results with GPR or metal detection, sensor fusion of these techniques with acoustic detection would give promising results. Two methods are used for the acoustic excitation of the soil: laser excitation and loudspeaker excitation. A promising concept is using lasers for excitation and monitoring for complete stand-off detection. Results from a field test and laboratory experiments show the feasibility of laser excitation for ALD. In these experiments buried landmine surrogates were measured with ALD using a Nd-YAG laser at 1.06 μm for the acoustic generation and a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) system at 1.54 μm for the detection of soil vibrations. An analysis is given of the experimental results showing the potential and the inherent limitations of the technique. We discuss the relative merits of LDV detection versus microphone detection of the laser-induced acoustic vibration. It was found that the LDV has limitations with respect to microphone detection due to the influence of surface effects that are prominent in LDV but absent in microphone detection.