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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.