Enhanced operator interface for hand-held landmine detector

As landmines get harder to detect, the complexity of landmine detectors has also been increasing. To increase the probability of detection and decrease the false alarm rate of low metallic landmines, many detectors employ multiple sensing modalities, which include radar and metal detector. Unfortunately, the operator interface for these new detectors stays pretty much the same as for the older detectors. Although the amount of information that the new detectors acquire has increase significantly, the interface has been limited to a simple audio interface. We are currently developing a hybrid audiovisual interface for enhancing the overall performance of the detector. The hybrid audiovisual interface combines the simplicity of the audio output with the rich spatial content of the video display. It is designed to optimally present the output of the detector and also to give the proper feedback to the operator. Instead of presenting all the data to the operator simultaneously, the interface allows the operator to access the information as needed. This capability is critical to avoid information overload, which can significantly reduce the performance of the operator. The audio is used as the primary notification signal, while the video is used for further feedback, discrimination, localization and sensor fusion. The idea is to let the operator gets the feedback that he needs and enable him look at the data in the most efficient way. We are also looking at a hybrid man-machine detection system which utilizes precise sweeping by the machine and powerful human cognitive ability. In such a hybrid system, the operator is free to concentrate on discrimination task, such as manually fusing the output of the different sensing modalities, instead of worrying about the proper sweep technique. In developing this concept, we have been using the virtual mine lane to validate some of these concepts. We obtained some very encouraging results from our preliminary tests. It clearly shows that with the proper feedback, the performance of the operator can be improved significantly in a very short time.