Practical Issues in Manual Demining: Implications for New Detection Technologies

Summary

New landmine and explosive detection technologies have been the goal of many research groups since the mid 1990’s. Apart from obvious military advantages, the motivation has been a desire to speed up landmine clearance rates significantly. Current landmine clearance relies mainly on metal detectors and the false alarm rates are very high. It is widely believed, correctly, that this creates time-consuming work for deminers. However, analysis of actual demining rates shows that the clearance rates are faster than many people might expect, and that factors other than detection of targets can dominate performance. Vegetation clearance can take as much as 75% of the time needed by deminers.