Development and analysis of a real-time system for automated detection of improvised explosive device indicators from ground vehicles

We propose a real-time change detection system to be used as a vehicle-mounted early-warning system for indicators of improvised explosive devices. Within the context of military route clearance, the system automatically detects suspicious changes in the environment with respect to a previous patrol. For this purpose, historical images of the live scene are retrieved from a database and registered to the live image through 2.5-D view synthesis, using the three-dimensional (3-D) scene geometry acquired from a stereo camera. Changes are then found using local-area statistics in the CIE-Lab color space. A set of spatiotemporal filters is used to reject irrelevant alarms, resulting in a limited set of confident changes to be presented to the operator through an interactive graphical user interface. Next to the algorithmic contributions, we elaborate on the real-time design, featuring graphical processing units for the most time-consuming processing tasks, a pipelined architecture to increase the system throughput, and we split the system into a live and offline processing chain. This way, real-time change detection at 3.5 fps is achieved on images of 1920 × 1440 pixels. Finally, an extensive system validation featuring realistic experiments shows promising detection capabilities and robustness to, e.g., lateral displacements of up to 6 m.