Image Radar Determining the Nominal Body Contour for Characterization of Concealed Person-Worn Explosives

Accurate characterization of suspicious body-worn objects may speed up the passenger screening process by reducing the number of manual screenings, while also maintaining the ability to detect more complex threats. This improves passenger experience in the screening process while preserving strong security. This paper presents an innovative real-time method for millimeter wave nearfield radar reconstructing the nominal contours of the human bodies without affixed foreign objects. This important step is required for characterizing unique aspects of concealed objects when they are affixed to the body. The method is verified experimentally when applied to the actual images of a recently developed laboratory prototype millimeter-wave scanning system. We show that the method works well both when there is a weak dielectric object affixed to a human body and when a portion of the body cross-section is not captured by the imaging system. The reconstructed contour can be used to estimate the dielectric constant of the suspicious body-worn objects.