Proposals for Performance Demonstration and Modular Reliability Assessment for Humanitarian Demining

For safe and reliable demining it is necessary to determine the actual true performance of mine searching equipment in detecting mines. The subject to detect a hidden subject by penetrating physical interaction with the target is similar to that of non-destructive testing where it is looked for hidden cracks etc. in material via waves and rays. The non destructive testing profession is now about 100 years old and developed some procedures to check reliability of testing. Those principles like the performance demonstration where the successful detections are statistically evaluated against false calls rates and their implementation in an industrial standard (ASME section XI appendix VIII) are analysed. A first adoption to demining was accomplished in the prescription for blind trials in the CEN workshop agreement CEN BT 126 CWA07 for test and evaluation of metal detectors. A number of blind trials were accomplished within an ITEP project to learn about the necessary statistical layout of those trials to achieve true, reproducible and repeatable results to give guidance to selection and improvement of metal detectors. The special focus in these investigations was on the influence of the human factor due to the degree of experience of the operators and the infulence of uncooperative soil. The correlation of the results of the physical parameter measurement and the statistical results is analysed in a first attempt