A New Use for Weapons-Detecting Radar System

For several years ending in mid-2012, University of Michigan professor Kamal Sarabandi was funded by the Department of Defense to work on a type of radar to find weapons and bombs concealed on a person's body. This technology was for military uses, but in the aftermath of the Newtown, CT school shooting, Sarabandi has envisioned home-front applications. The technology can potentially identify a hidden gun or bomb on an approaching person about a football field away in less than a second. Sarabandi paired his millimeter-wave radar system with Doppler radar signal processing to pick out the signature of a person walking in the noisy radar scene. Then he used radar polarimetry to find the signal coming from the pedestrian's torso and identify the glare that a metal object hidden there would cause.

Transcript

00:00:04 I was uh listening to a debate whether you know schools should be armed and everybody teachers and principals in a school should be armed well I said there must be a better way and then you know occurred to me that we have this technology and that is one way of at least uh keeping the bad guys out the objective of this project was to design a radar system that could detect

00:00:29 explosive and concealed weapons that some people may carry as they enter public places if you go to the airports for example they put you let's say in a scanner and there you have to stay stationary and it takes time for them to image your body the idea here was to come up with a device that could do that without stopping people and do it you know from a far

00:00:56 distance so how does this system work so we take the frequency response of the human body as as it walks so it it becomes sort of a function of time so the time frequency analysis that we do creates a signature which we call um human walk DNA all the features of the human gate for example can be captured in that you can for example distinguish a slow person from a fast person a

00:01:22 person in a bicycle from let's say a dog or a person that is walking and we use that in conjunction with another technique which we call radar polarimetry in order to identify objects the back scatter from human body does not produce much of cross-polarized unless you are having an irregular object that you're carrying with you that becomes a Telltale of that this

00:01:47 person is carrying something and that person for example can be pulled aside and further interrogated the potential use of this originally was envisioned for for military application but now with the recent disasters that we have observed in the school shootings and other U type of incidents uh I think you know this can be utilized at

00:02:09 airports it can be utilized at uh stadiums wherever you know that there is a large group of people that you know you want to protect that is a perfect scenario where you could take a look at all people who are coming through one by one and you know the measurements uh with this system doesn't take more than few microsc so as quickly as you can move people through that gate as many

00:02:34 this is as many as people you can interrogate with this system