The use of metal detectors in the humanitarian demining industry closely resembles the use of electromagnetic techniques in the mineral exploration industry to find conductive orebodies. An overview is given for the landmine problem and some of the current technologies used in the demining process. The similarities of metal detection to geophysical transient electromagnetic data acquisition, processing and interpretation are used to suggest ways in which more information than just the ''presence of metal'' may be obtained when using pulse induction (PI) metal detectors.