Mine Action Technologies: Problems and Recommendations

Mine action research and development (R&D) is an ongoing process that has yielded many insightful and invaluable technologies. Future mine action R&D will require the collaboration of end-users, donors and technologists in order to develop equipment and tools based on real needs rather than assumed needs

PARADIS: A Prototype for Assisting Rational Activities in Humanitarian Demining Using Images from Satellites

The PARADIS project aims to improve the planning of humanitarian demining campaigns with a software package working from the country scale to the field scale. A demining organization and an image interpretation team work together to put this system to use and benefit mine-affected areas

Humanitarian Demining and Robotics

Mines were used for the first time during the American Civil War in the United States (1861-1865). Anti-tank mines were later ameliorated and laid on the battlefields of the First World War. Mine clearing operations did not pose major problems with those visible and easy-to-detect anti-tank mines. The reason why Anti-personnel mines have been conceived and systematically used on the anti-tank minefields during the Second World War was because such mines prevented the enemy from easy demining of the defense system

Determination of the radial profile of the photoelastic coefficient of plastic optical fibers

We developed a measurement method to determine the radial distribution of the photoelastic coefficient C(r) in step-index polymer optical fibers (POFs). The method is based on the measurement of the retardance profile of a transversally illuminated fiber for increasing tensile load. The radial profile C(r) is obtained from the inverse Abel transform of this retardance profile. We measured polymer fibers from different manufacturers. The radial profile of the photoelastic constant can considerable vary depending on the type and treatment of POFs, even when made from similar materials, which leads to the conclusion that the photoelastic constant should be characterized for each different type of POF. The impact of annealing the fiber samples on C(r) is also addressed

Acoustic-Labial Speaker Verification

This paper describes a multimodal approach for speaker verification. The system consists of two classifiers, one using visual features and the other using acoustic features. A lip tracker is used to extract visual information from the speaking face which provides shape and intensity features. We describe an approach for normalizing and mapping different modalities onto a common confidence interval. We also describe a novel method for integrating the scores of multiple classifiers. Verification experiments are reported for the individual modalities and for the combined classifier. The performance of the integrated system outperformed each sub-system and reduced the false acceptance rate of the acoustic sub-system from 2.3\% to 0.5\%