Field trials for development of multiband signal processing solutions to detect disturbed soil

This paper briefly describes a field trial designed to give a realistic data set on a road section containing areas with disturbed soil due to buried IEDs. During a time-span of a couple of weeks, the road was repeatedly imaged using a multi-band sensor system with spectral coverage from visual to LWIR. The field trial was conducted to support a long term research initiative aiming at using EO sensors and sensor fusion to detect areas of disturbed soil. Samples from the collected data set is presented in the paper and shown together with an investigation on basic statistical properties of the data. We conclude that upon visual inspection, it is fully possible to discover areas that have been disturbed, either by using visual and/or IR sensors. Reviewing the statistical analysis made, we also conclude that samples taken from both disturbed and undisturbed soil have well definable statistical distributions for all spectral bands. We explore statistical tests to discriminate between different samples showing positive indications that discrimination between disturbed and undisturbed soil is potentially possible using statistical methods.