NATO STO

The use of Person Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (PB-IEDs) by terrorists is one of the key factors that makes the asymmetric warfare model so difficult to defeat. PB-IEDs can be easily, fabricated and concealed on the human body and they allow the perpetrator to adopt different methods of attack on targets of opportunity. These types of attacks are increasing not only in areas of conflict, but also in urban areas far away from the war zones. Therefore, governments worldwide are actively seeking countermeasures to be better prepared against current and future threats. A first stage in countering PB-IEDs is the detection of the threat. Detection of PB-IEDs can be carried out with various techniques and technologies and at various levels of operation. Aviation security is an example of multi-level, multi-sensor detection of an IED threat. Military forces are also tasked to protect sensitive locations using similar technologies and compound protection or event protection are common in counter PB-IEDs operations. The use of multi-sensors for countering PB-IEDs is important in order to increase the probability of detection and reduce false alarm rates. Furthermore no single sensor can detect all explosive threats. Usually each sensor uses its own decision algorithm and the outputs are combined either in parallel or series in a post-detection sensor fusion in order to improve the detection performances. This type of sensor fusion is relatively easy to employ, since the sensors can be considered as black boxes. Further improvements can be achieved if multi-sensor fusion techniques are applied before detection by individual sensors and this can mitigate the limitations associated with the loss of information through hard decisions at sensor level. However, this is only possible if the raw and pre-processed data produced by each sensor is made available to the fusion node. Several national research campaigns have focused on the detection of PB-IEDs in various military scenarios. Tests have been carried out in collaboration with the industry and research institutes, and sensor fusion techniques were applied to the output data (post-detection). There are only a few cases of pre-detection sensor fusion techniques carried out in laboratory environments, at a low system architecture TRL.