Solutions for 3D position referencing for handheld metal detectors used in humanitarian demining

Handheld metal detectors based on the eddy current principle are widely used in humanitarian demining, but their main disadvantage is the high false alarm rate caused by harmless clutter objects or “uncooperative” soils. The key to lower the false alarm rate is to provide more information to the deminer by imaging, the use of a-priori information for a better soil compensation and signature classification. Therefore position referenced measurement data is needed. This paper is focused on solutions for the acquisition and processing of position referenced measurements, which are applicable to handheld metal detectors and usable in the field.