The Belgian humanitarian demining project and the European research context

This paper presents in a first part the Belgian humanitarian demining project HUDEM and places it in a second part in the European context. The HUDEM project is a nice example to treat, because of the fact that a lot of different technologies are explored in this project. The contribution of this paper with respect to the HUDEM project is to describe the (results of the) efforts to increase our knowledge on sensors and sensor/ground characteristics, on designing new sensors or fine-tuning old ones, and on processing the data produced by sensors. Also, in this project the detection is also considered as a global process in which the outputs of the sensors, considered as killed specialists, are integrated in a fusion operation. In the remote sensing field, the RMA has also developed efficient classification tools for satellite and airborne images, in order to assist the image analysts in their interpretation tasks. Last but not least, an overview is given of the Belgian HUDEM-robotics activities. The Europ ean context is shown through a short presentation of the ESPRIT Research and Development projects which are being sponsored by the European Commission, the Humanitarian demining aspects of the European thematic CLAWAR network, and of the Joint International Multi-sensor Mine-signatures measurement campaign (MsMs Project). When comparing the philosophy behind the Belgian HUDEM project on one hand and the way that the European Commission has been attributing priorities in the choice of the projects which they are supporting on the other hand, it can be noticed that these two philosophies are very similar. The HUDEM, CLAWAR Task 9, and MsMs projects are all being managed by the Royal Military Academy (RMA) of Belgium.