Immersive Methods for Mine Warfare.

We are developing a synthetic environment to be used in combination with real environments for the purpose of mine counter measures. Two examples of our work involve applications to land-based minefields and an application to submarine defense. In the former application, imaging is done with six spectral bands. It has been shown empirically that a sequence of images taken in six spectral bands when viewed sequentially will allow one to distinguish between real mines, partially buried real mines, decoys, other metallic objects, and other manner of debris. The image can be viewed as a 2-dimensional image with an 6-dimensional vector attached to each pixel location. We use the grand-tour technique (Wegman and Shen, 1993) to find an optimal discrimant between real mines and other objects. We then use a head-mounted display (HMD) which is semitransparent so that the real-world objects can be seen through it. After processing the scene, the suspected sites of real mines are superimposed on the visual field so that the soldier wearing the HMD is alerted to the presence of mines. The submarine application is similar. We use Crystal Eyes technology and Silicon Graphics Onyx systems in our laboratory.