When Bob Barnas, 66, of High Springs, served in Vietnam, a member of his company stepped on a land mine and was killed instantly.
A team of UF researchers is now working on improving the probability of detecting land mines and decreasing the number of false alarms during detection.
“Having equipment that can find land mines in places is an important thing as Vietnam moves forward and they start farming again,” Barnas sa.
Joseph Wilson, an assistant professor in UF’s Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering and researcher, said land mines are both a military and humanitarian problem.
There are more than 9 million land mines in Egypt alone, Wilson said. Most were buried in WWII for the tank wars, but they’ll still blow up.
“There are land mines and buried explosive devices all over the world,” Wilson said.
The Army Research Office granted the researchers $1 million in September. Wilson said this money will go toward paying the researchers for their efforts. They are now in the process of receiving data for analysis.
The researchers will create algorithms and evaluate existing systems using data on computers in UF’s Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering to find the best way to detect land mines.
“If you make a mistake … then somebody loses his or her life,” said associate professor in UF’s Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering and researcher Arunava Banerjee.
Wilson said companies make ground-penetrating radars and sensing devices, but they often falsely detect underground explosives.
The goal of UF’s research is to evaluate the existing ground-penetrating radars and sensing devices.
Banerjee said the problem is difficult because devices need to be able to work over all different terrains.
After this project concludes, the government could fund contractors to build working systems using the information from the research.
Wilson said the team was asked to apply for the grant. He said UF has been working with systems to identify land mines and explosive hazards since about 2000.
“It’s really a hard problem,” he said. “It’s one of those problems that keeps on giving. Because it’s so hard to solve, you can make incremental progress for a long time.”
Paul Gader, a professor and the department’s chair, and Damon Woodard, who is coming from Clemson University to join UF in January, will join Banerjee and Wilson in their research.
[A version of this story ran on page 9 on 12/7/2014]
