European Project of Remote Detection: SMART in a nutshell

This paper shortly describes the principles and ideas behind the project SMART, a European project intended to help Mine Action Centres (MAC) or Mine Action Authorities (MAA) in their task of area reduction by providing a GIS-based environment with specific tools to ease the interpretation work of the operator. Using multi-spectral optical data as well as SAR data obtained during a flight campaign in Croatia and satellite data from before the conflict, the tools will help the land-cover classification and the detection of indicators of presence or absence of mine-suspected areas. The results of these tools will be given to a data fusion module that will summarise all data and contextual information available to facilitate the creation of maps of indicators from which mapss of danger can be derived. A more detailed and technical description of SMART has been given – and some results described – in [13]. This paper focuses on the principles of the project and shortly presents some new results. 1 Area reduction: a key process Area reduction has been recognized as a mine action activity where reduction in time and resources could help a lot. Long-term empirical data from CROMAC, the Croatian Mine Action Center, show that we can estimate that around 10% to 15% of the suspected area in Croatia is actually mined. The minefield records alone do not contain enough information for the proper allocation of limited de-mining resources to reallymined areas. Their completeness and reliability are not high enough. Decision makers need additional information. SMART is intended to provide some of this additional information that would help in two ways: it can reduce the suspected area on some places and reinforce the suspicion of others. The goal of the SMART project is to provide a GIS-based system – the SMART system – augmented with dedicated tools and methods designed to use multispectral and radar data in order to assist the human analyst in the interpretation of the mined scene during the area reduction process. The usefulness of such image processing tools to help photo-interpretation has already been studied: the possibility to process automatically a large amount of data and help a visual analysis is among their advantages [6] [7]. The use of SMART includes a short field survey in order to collect knowledge about the site, a flight campaign to record the data – multispectral with the Daedalus sensor and SAR with the E-SAR –, and the use of the SMART system by an operator to detect indicators of presence or absence of mine-suspected areas. With the help of a data fusion module based on belief functions [1][9][10][11][12] the operator will prepare thematic maps that will synthesise all the knowledge gathered with these indicators. These maps of indicators can be transformed into danger maps showing how dangerous an area may be according to the location of known indicators. These maps are designed to help the area reduction process as described in the present paper. Abandoned Land Fields in use without vegetation Fields in use with vegetation Residential areas Roads Pastures Forests, hedges or shrubs Water Radar shadows B