Experiments of thermographic landmine detection with reduced size and compressed time

Infrared thermography is a promising technique for the detection of buried landmines. Its effectiveness is not yet satisfactory, but it can presumably be improved by means of proper data-processing tools. The development of these tools, however, necessitates large amounts of reference data. On-field experiments are required to generate reference data, but they can be very demanding, since it is arduous to control the thermal problem outdoors and all over a whole day. In view of that, a method was developed to reproduce in the laboratory, with reduced size and duration, experiments of thermographic mine detection. The method was devised by the dimensional analysis of the governing equations, for which a generalized formulation is presented, and it was implement by a purposely built apparatus, which allows taking into account the directional properties of the solar radiation. A few test cases with reduced scale are reported here, to show the potential of the proposed experimental approach.