Standoff Hyperspectral Imaging of Explosive Residues
Bruce Bernacki, an optical scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, along with Mark Phillips are researching the detection of explosives on surfaces using a tunable quantum cascade laser illuminator and a thermal imaging camera.
Transcript
00:00:02 my name is Bruce Baki and I'm an optical scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Mark Philips and I are researching the detection of explosives on surfaces using a tunable Quantum Cascade laser Illuminator and a thermal imaging camera Illuminating material that's within the range of our laser reveals a distinctive molecular signature or fingerprint and explosives
00:00:24 have this molecular fingerprint to help identify this unknown fingerprint we use a reference or fingerprint light library to compare against other molecular fingerprints for a similar explosive how our technique works is like this if someone has touched explosives and then touches a surface an explosive residue is Left Behind we take the laser shine it on a Surface while scanning a range
00:00:47 of laser frequencies and then image the reflected or scattered light with the thermal imaging camera the range of frequencies of light shined onto the surface creates a series of wavelength snapshots in kind of a three-dimensional data set called an image hypercube you can think of an image hypercube as a photo album with many pages on each page of the photo album we have the image of
00:01:09 the explosive residue taken at each wavelength band of the tunable laser Illuminator using this image and special software to compare the image hypercube to a fingerprint Library we can evaluate whether explosives are present on the surface or not and if present which particular explosive one application for our technology would be a fixed monitoring
00:01:31 station where the equipment is set up in certain locations and an operator sits at a terminal and Views the images as say Vehicles pass by the operator would then analyze the images for evidence of explosive residues our technology could also be realized as a handheld instrument that could scan across the surface to search for particular explosives or other chemical residues
00:01:54 between Mark's 5 years of experience with tunable lasers and my 25-year history with Optical instrumentation our technique really is a great Synergy of hyperspectral image analysis and tunable laser spectroscopy science it's this kind of cross disciplinary work that makes research at pnnl stand out and that can lead to effective tools for Force protection and First
00:02:29 Responders