Vehicle threat locating via the detection of anomalies on roads and their verges

Situational awareness originating from advanced sensor systems augments the ability of sound decision making. This paper considers the image analysis problem given a multi-sensor system mounted on an army patrol vehicle that serves as an early threat alert mechanism. Hence, it concerns forward looking sensors that move through a complex environment whilst detecting events or points of interest. The objective comprises identifying potential threats to the vehicle such as Improvised Explosive Devices (IED). This paper focuses on how an optical sensor and a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) are exploited for detecting and tracking stationary anomalies on the road's surface and verges. The applied approach consists of a road scene analysis that extracts the road's surface and verges followed by anomaly detection in each of the extracted regions separately. The detected anomalies from both sensors are tracked and combined in geographical coordinates where their threat-levels also increase due to the response of other sensors. The proposed methodology was assessed during a full system's demonstration. The obtained results within a simplified real situation show considerable potential.