Our PPM MarkIVb system is now used by a professional company whose main job is to detect and remove UXO in France.
Several upgrades have been applied to our support system to facilitate this job.
UXO detection projects usually require large surface area to be systematically scanned to detect small, shallow but also large and deep explosive weapons like bombs, shells, grenades and land mines. One side effect is to eliminate as much as possible the shallow ferrous debris in order to spare a lot of useless digging.
During the passed wars, some regions have been riddled with many bombings and shellings sometimes during long periods.
As a consequence, some area contain a large number of UXO buried at various depths.
One specific type of upgrade applied on the operational PPM system was to make its carrying more comfortable during the long survey sessions.
The second type of upgrade has been applied on the post-processing system to facilitate and speed up the target detection on the survey grids.
The third upgrage was to facilitate the pinpointing on the ground of the targets detected during the post-processing.
Some of these upgrades are now operational in the field and some are still in prototyping phase.
The operation of the PPM is being optimized by the mounting of the control box, the GPS and its antenna, the battery and the sensor in a backpack leaving the hands of the operator free. The human-interface has been implemented on a 8" or 10" tablet inserted in a watertight plastic envelope and connected to the PPM control box through a Bluetooth link. The shape of the survey sessions is controlled through a precise GPS system.
The windows-based post-processing system has bee upgraded with a 2D colored grid generation process and an automatic target detection system.
The figure 95-1 attached shows the GPS and PPM tracks as they appear during the real-time session or during the review of a survey file.
You can see the numerous parallel survey lines shown by the 2D GPS plot, the field gradients displayed as variable size color bubbles and the vertical barchart showing the variations of field gradients over time. In this case, the rectangular area covered by this session is 40x40m.
Already here, some potential targets are visible. They can be located with their GPS coordinates using this window.
Then, a 2D colored contour grid is generated by a sophisticaed interpolation algorithm. This is shown in figure 95-2.
The potential targets are now much more visible. The general average field level is colored in light green and the sensible variations of field gradient are colored in warm colors for positive gradients while negative gradients spots are colored in cold colors.
From this grid, it is now possible to manually mark and list the location of potential targets and the data to be used for the evaluation of location, size and depth. From this list, it is then possible to generate a list of GPS waypoints to be used later for target pinpointing.
From this grid, it is also possible to start an automatic target detection process giving for example the figure 95-3. This process detects all the field gradients exceeding a given threshold, measuring their surface and height and marking them on the 2D grid.
Most targets generate what is called 'dipoles', i.e. a positive field peak closed to its corresponding negative peak.
Some of them reduce to 'monopoles' made of a single positive or negative peak.
Lastly, we have upgraded the real-time system to define the shortest route between the target list and to navigate the operator through that route using a virtual compass. See figure 95-4.
Willy
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