Context-dependent fusion for landmine detection with ground-penetrating radar

Abstract

We present a novel method for fusing the results of multiple landmine detection algorithms that use different types of features and different classification methods. The proposed fusion method, called Context-Dependent Fusion (CDF) is motivated by the fact that the relative performance of different detectors can vary significantly depending on the mine type, geographical site, soil and weather conditions, and burial depth. The training part of CDF has two components: context extraction and algorithm fusion. In context extraction, the features used by the different algorithms are combined and used to partition the feature space into groups of similar signatures, or contexts. The algorithm fusion component assigns an aggregation weight to each detector in each context based on its relative performance within the context. Results on large and diverse Ground Penetrating Radar data collections show that the proposed method can identify meaningful and coherent clusters and that different expert algorithms can be identified for the different contexts. Our initial experiments have also indicated that the context-dependent fusion outperforms all individual detectors.