What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?:
The sudden availability at reasonable prices of spectacular advances in electronics (that is, advances in Sound card technology) that can be used for many purposes other than what they were designed for.
Later on in the research the project became vastly more attractive with an understanding of what the GStreamer standard offers and how the ready availability of Open Source GStreamer software modules means that a large of the software work has already been completed without having to write any code. GStreamer is probably the main recent standard for creating modules for multimedia.
From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea is in? - Explain further:
Stage 3.
I have completed the following: Extensive research on the idea. Initial design including working out all the standards to use. Nearly full documentation on the concepts and the initial design. Creation of a website containing all of this. I believe that there is less work to do to complete it to a usable product, than the work already done.
I haven't done the work of advertising this project yet. This means that up till now it has been one person project. It is now time to try to bring as many programmers and other helpers into the project.
Comments
Re: Humanise.org
There is a big difference between "should be achievable" and "is achievable". The Humanitarian Demining community have a strong dislike to anything that doesn't work 100 per cent. They believe that it is better not to demine an area than to remove 19 out 20 mines. People don't go to an area with lots of hidden mines. Take out most of the mines and people start using the land. So often it is the children that find remaining mines.
There are many dozens of methods being attempted to find mines. Most work to some degree and often show great promise. Most of this is being done by commercial companies and even though many are funded by various grants etc, particularly Government grants, the commercial companies expect to 'commercialize' any thing that they succeed in. Even the Universities now want to 'commercialize' any thing they do.
In other areas that I'm involved in such as Content Management Systems, there are large numbers of competing Open Source projects, each with large numbers of people working on them and each being given away for free. Strangely, in the design of products for Humanitarian demining, there is so little that is Open Source, Creative Commons or anything the provides Public Domain utility. The moment anybody thinks of anything new it is straight down to the patents office.
A lot of the other methods find other uses. Assuming the aerial photography techniques you mentioned work with buried mines, they would be very attractive to the military in order to just locate the overall minefields. In war time situations, the military are often prepared to lose a few soldiers in order to get through mine fields quickly.
In my research, I have found many methods. A lot of them have been biological such as training bees or rats etc. Most of them work but there is all sorts of problems with getting 100 out of 100 mines found. The two methods that continue to work at 100 per cent in the Humanitarian area are good quality traditional electromagnetic metal detectors and prodding with wooden sticks. Some areas continue to use the prodding with wooden sticks. The only other method that is making appreciable inroads into this is Ground Penetrating Radar.
Good quality electromagnetic induction based metal detectors have an interesting problem. While they can find all the current mines, even the low metal ones, their problem is that they are too good at finding things. They find large amounts of metal scrap etc that is often in the same ground. The large number of false positives can get to the point that they might just as well prod everywhere with wooden sticks. Ultimately, the roadmap or path for the project is to use the product or create new products to continue to research methods that can reduce this.
This is not a project to create one product. It is meant to be a continuing project. Induction metal detectors are split into two groups, Frequency Domain detectors and Time Domain detectors. The top end Time Domain Detectors are generally better for Gold detectors and the top end Frequency Domain detectors are generally better for demining. It swaps around in different areas. For example, in metal sands you would use Time Domain Detectors for demining.
The first project is a Frequency Domain Detector. From there it can either go to imaging with arrays of coils or to combining a Frequency Domain with Time Domain detection.
When we start combining Frequency Domain with Time Domain Detection we start hitting the problem of how to get around Patents with these being simple patents of obvious technology. One of the many advantages that I'm hoping for with the continuing project is the pre publication of technology before all the obvious stuff gets patented.
The overall design being based on GStreamer is amazingly versatile. It can continue to be expanded or changed with extra modules etc with new modules that handle any data that 'Streams'. The initial design is handling Pulse Code Modulated (PCM) data which is very similar to sound but it could be almost anything. It allows a great variety of new techniques to be tried including quite different transducers. There is an amazing array of things that could be incorporated into the design.
Where the project goes later will be up to the people in the project. The only requirement is that it will be open source or creative commons with the general good of the world in mind.
Re: Humanise.org
This should be achievable using image filtering technologies over aerial photography, with the filters tuned to the IR/UV signiatures of common land-mine components. I've seen the same kind of technology used to read "colour" frequencies of dope plants, blue-green algae, etc.. with very reliable results.