Thermal detection of buried circular objects with a rule-based fast shape detection algorithm

Abandoned buried objects are global problems for humanitarian and military purposes. Several portable and vehicle mounted remotely operated platforms and sensors have been used to detect these objects. In terms of to performance and applicability sensors are divided into two groups, main sensors and support sensors. While sensors like GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) and EMI (ElectroMagnetic Induction) sensors are considered as main, others, such as IR (infrared) and acoustic sensors support the information obtained from them. This paper will focus on mainly two phases, observation and image processing. A thermal camera has been used to receive thermal images from the soil surface where objects are buried in different depths and received thermal images were processed by a simple rule-based "Fast Circular Shape Detection" algorithm that we have introduced. The results of image processing participate in fusion of information used in determination and classification the buried objects.