Dual Sensor “ALlS” for Humanitarian Demining

ALIS is a handheld “Dual sensor” which is designed to be used for humanitarian demining. The ALIS system is compact and light weight which is less than 3.1kg, and can be used for more than 6 hours. ALIS is a dual sensor, which combines EMI (Electromagnetic Induction) sensor and GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar). This is a hand held sensor, equipped with position tracking system, therefore ALIS can acquire the EMI and GPR signal together with its position information, while it is scanned on the ground surface by an operator by hand manually. Then, the data can be processed using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing (migration) and can reconstruct 3-D subsurface image. GPR of ALIS operates at 1-3GHz, and the penetration depth of the GPR is 20-50cm. The development of ALIS started in 2002, and after evaluation test in some mine affected countries including Afghanistan, a long-term evaluation test has been conducted in Cambodia since 2009. We found that the prototype of ALIS is capable for imaging buried mines, and can reduce the false alarm ratio drastically. We have detected more than 80 buried land mines in Cambodia mine fields. The ALIS is based on these practical evaluation conducted together with CMAC (Cambodian Mine Action Center).