Benchmarking Deep Learning and Statistical Target Detection Methods for PFM-1 Landmine Detection in UAV Hyperspectral Imagery

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Main Authors: Lekhak, Sagar, Pulakurthi, Prasanna Reddy, Bhatta, Ramesh, Ientilucci, Emmett J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lekhak, Sagar
Pulakurthi, Prasanna Reddy
Bhatta, Ramesh
Ientilucci, Emmett J.
author_facet Lekhak, Sagar
Pulakurthi, Prasanna Reddy
Bhatta, Ramesh
Ientilucci, Emmett J.
contents In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with imaging sensors and automated processing algorithms have emerged as a promising tool to accelerate large-area surveys while reducing risk to human operators. Although hyperspectral imaging (HSI) enables material discrimination using spectral signatures, standardized benchmarks for UAV-based landmine detection remain scarce. In this work, we present a systematic benchmark of four classical statistical detection algorithms, including Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), Matched Filter (MF), Adaptive Cosine Estimator (ACE), and Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM), alongside a proposed lightweight Spectral Neural Network utilizing Parametric Mish activations for PFM-1 landmine detection. We also release pixel-level binary ground truth masks (target/background) to enable standardized, reproducible evaluation. Evaluations were conducted on inert PFM-1 targets across multiple scene crops using a recently released VNIR hyperspectral dataset. Metrics such as receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under the curve (AUC), precision-recall (PR) curve, and average precision (AP) were used. While all methods achieve high ROC-AUC on an independent test set, the ACE method observes the highest AUC of 0.989. However, because target pixels are extremely sparse relative to background, ROC-AUC alone can be misleading; under precision-focused evaluation (PR and AP), the Spectral-NN outperforms classical detectors, achieving the highest AP. These results emphasize the need for precision-focused evaluation, scene-aware benchmarking, and learning-based spectral models for reliable UAV-based hyperspectral landmine detection. The code and pixel-level annotations will be released.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_10434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking Deep Learning and Statistical Target Detection Methods for PFM-1 Landmine Detection in UAV Hyperspectral Imagery
Lekhak, Sagar
Pulakurthi, Prasanna Reddy
Bhatta, Ramesh
Ientilucci, Emmett J.
Image and Video Processing
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with imaging sensors and automated processing algorithms have emerged as a promising tool to accelerate large-area surveys while reducing risk to human operators. Although hyperspectral imaging (HSI) enables material discrimination using spectral signatures, standardized benchmarks for UAV-based landmine detection remain scarce. In this work, we present a systematic benchmark of four classical statistical detection algorithms, including Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), Matched Filter (MF), Adaptive Cosine Estimator (ACE), and Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM), alongside a proposed lightweight Spectral Neural Network utilizing Parametric Mish activations for PFM-1 landmine detection. We also release pixel-level binary ground truth masks (target/background) to enable standardized, reproducible evaluation. Evaluations were conducted on inert PFM-1 targets across multiple scene crops using a recently released VNIR hyperspectral dataset. Metrics such as receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under the curve (AUC), precision-recall (PR) curve, and average precision (AP) were used. While all methods achieve high ROC-AUC on an independent test set, the ACE method observes the highest AUC of 0.989. However, because target pixels are extremely sparse relative to background, ROC-AUC alone can be misleading; under precision-focused evaluation (PR and AP), the Spectral-NN outperforms classical detectors, achieving the highest AP. These results emphasize the need for precision-focused evaluation, scene-aware benchmarking, and learning-based spectral models for reliable UAV-based hyperspectral landmine detection. The code and pixel-level annotations will be released.
title Benchmarking Deep Learning and Statistical Target Detection Methods for PFM-1 Landmine Detection in UAV Hyperspectral Imagery
topic Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10434