Terror Gets A Short Stare

Since 9-11 TSA and DHS have been besieged with detector proposals for ferreting out  passengers attempting to conceal explosives and hazardous substances beneath their clothing.  They have run the gamut of technical ambition, most bad, many ugly, and variously plagued by  poor signal-to-noise ratios  and alarming false positive rates. Some that work do so more by brute force than technical elegance- what can't you detect with a MR scanner, a sawed off synchotron .and a megabuck array of single crystal gadolinium scintillators ?

Few  of the black boxes on offer have seen practical deployment, so I was pleasantly surprised by a gizmo in prototype production by the British ex-MOD firm, Qinetiq.

This sub-terahertz  gadget relies on the short end of the ambient  millimeter wave spectrum to illuminate the difference between what people are made of and what they may be carrying. Advances in high electron mobility indium phosphide  semiconductor detectors and a MIMIC amplifier allow a simple dielectric lens (the white-domed top of the hooded cocktail shaker in the photo)  to give passengers the  once over at a few hundred gigahertz, to see if they are plain vanilla humans, or packing liquid or solid contraband that does not match the dielectric properties of flesh, blood, and bone.

The dielectric lens and a boresighted video camera ( the cocktail shaker's dark spout ) afford a  magnified directional view fed to an internal millimeter wavelength horn antenna and a one dimensional scan train not much more complicated than a bar code reader. Discrimination is afforded by proprietary  AI firmware that presumably has total recall of what people look like over several  wavelengths, allowing comparison of the real-time background illumination with what emanates from a target up to several hundred feet away.

If a passenger's millimeter wave  profile lights up as anomalous, security people come into play to see what he or she may be hiding. This is a very simple system , but MIMIC devices lend themselves to phased arrays, and the technology could grow into a sophisticated imaging system if this early embodiment delivers  high passenger throughput and few false positives. A larger roadside version can detect concealed passengers in soft-sided Brit lorries, but here in the land of metal truck bodies , it will probably be debuting  in airports rather than Ro-Ro terminals.

Comments

[Max Anderson]

I sent a copy of this report over to my Tsa contact who was sent to me through hs site national terror alert. I say run with it. What is the cost? Also is the instruction manual complicated as far as maintenence and directions on how to use it? One last thing Russell, x-ray is outtie. Good work! Wired sent me a link to this invention release. I did a 2 part series on the recent flaws in us airport security at O'Hare and Jfk. I also worked with several us govt agencies in thwarting an attempt in Dallas Tx months ago as well. send me over some more data on this . I published you here with a very positive article. My site was getting a 100-200 hits a day for a while, let's see what thursday brings you here:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-O1ahRPI8er4gvVWAGF6W_kZB
best max anderson max1mos111@yahoo.com
Max

[BAM]

Perhaps you meant MMIC - Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit?

[Max Anderson]

Russel,
Just chacking back with you on how the millimeter wave is working out for you as with the TSA as I had discussed.
Max Anderson
max1mos111@yahoo.com

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