Investigation of late time response analysis for security applications

Hutchinson, Simon James (2015) Investigation of late time response analysis for security applications. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

The risk of armed attack by individual’s intent on causing mass casualties against soft targets, such as transport hubs continues. This has led to an increased need for a robust, reliable and accurate detection system for concealed threat items. This new system will need to improve upon existing detection systems including portal based scanners, x-ray scanners and hand held metal detectors as these all suffer from drawbacks of limited detection range and relatively long scanning times. A literature appraisal has been completed to assess the work being undertaken in the relevant field of Concealed Threat Detection (CTD). From this Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) radar has been selected as the most promising technology available for CTD at the present. UWB radar is provided by using Frequency Modulated Continuous Waves (FMCW) from laboratory test equipment over a multi gigahertz bandwidth. This gives the UWB radar the ability to detect both metallic and dielectric objects. Current published results have shown that it is possible to use the LTR technique to detect and discriminate both single objects isolated in air and multiple objects present within the same environment. A Vector Network Analyser (VNA) has been used to provide the Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar signal required for the LTR technique. This thesis presents the application of the Generalized Pencil-of-Function (GPOF), Dual Tree Wavelet Transform (DTWT) and the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT), both real and complex valued, in Late Time Response (LTR) security analysis to produce a viable detection algorithm. Supervised and unsupervised Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been applied to develop a successful classification scheme for Concealed Threat Detection (CTD) in on body security screening. Signal deconvolution and other techniques have been applied in post processing to allow for extraction of the LTR signal from the scattered return. Data vectorization has been applied to the extracted LTR signal using an unsupervised learning based ANN to prepare data for classification. Classification results for both binary threat/non-threat classifiers and a group classifier are presented. The GPOF method presented true positive classification results approaching 72% with wavelet based methods offering between 98% and 100%.