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

TL;DR

This paper benchmarks classical and neural network-based spectral detection methods for UAV hyperspectral landmine detection, emphasizing the importance of precision-focused evaluation and scene-aware benchmarking.

Contribution

It introduces a new lightweight Spectral Neural Network with Parametric Mish activations and provides a standardized dataset with ground truth masks for reproducible evaluation.

Findings

ACE achieved the highest ROC-AUC of 0.989

Spectral-NN outperformed classical detectors in precision metrics

High ROC-AUC does not necessarily imply effective detection in sparse target scenarios

Abstract

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.