Convolutional Autoencoder for Landmine Detection on GPR Scans

Buried unexploded landmines are a serious threat in many countries all over the World. As many landmines are nowadays mostly plastic made, the use of ground penetrating radar (GPR) systems for their detection is gaining the trend. However, despite several techniques have been proposed, a safe automatic solution is far from being at hand. In this paper, we propose a landmine detection method based on convolutional autoencoder applied to B-scans acquired with a GPR. The proposed system leverages an anomaly detection pipeline: the autoencoder learns a description of B-scans clear of landmines, and detects landmine traces as anomalies. In doing so, the autoencoder never uses data containing landmine traces at training time. This allows to avoid making strong assumptions on the kind of landmines to detect, thus paving the way to detection of novel landmine models.