MD + Smartphone = Minefinder

"While mine-clearing protocols have improved substantially since World War II, the technology used to locate buried landmines has changed little: De-miners use metal detectors to find and identify mines. On a battlefield strewn with metal debris, differentiating lethal mines from benign cans, wires, and casings is enormously time consuming.

Now, computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have designed an elegant system that ties in smartphones to assist humanitarian de-miners by augmenting the information supplied by their metal detectors. Their system, known as pattern enhancement tool for assisting land mine sensing (PETALS), and which will be presented at this week’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, takes de-mining advances in a new direction."

Read more HERE.

Image Credits: Justin Ide / Harvard Staff Photographer

Army Wants GPR + MD in One

"U.S. Army researchers are canvassing industry to find companies able to design and build a vehicle-mounted ground-penetrating radar system that can detect and mark buried improvised explosive devices (IEDs) made from metal, plastic, wood, conventional explosives, and homemade explosives.

The Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., released a sources-sought notice Thursday (W91CRB-11-R-0005) for a vehicle-mounted ground-penetrating radar system able to process data in real time to enable the vehicle operator to detect targets 10 feet in front of his vehicle."

Read more HERE.

Holographic Radar the Future for MD?

This is kind of a third hand report, but one you might not otherwise read. On Martin Rundkvist's blog, Aardvarchaeology, he describes how Holographic Radar would be an archaelogists best tool. It is (and has been) currently being developed to sniff out land mines, but the impact it could have on our hobby would be substantial!

Think of GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) but with a 3D visualization of the subsurface.

Click HERE to see what Martin has to say.

Click HERE to see an article from The Royal Society regarding it's use.