Simulations of three-dimensional radiometric imaging of extended sources in a security screening portal

Salmon, NA and Bowring, N (2015) Simulations of three-dimensional radiometric imaging of extended sources in a security screening portal. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract

This paper investigates by simulation the use of the three-dimensional aperture synthesis imaging technique to image three-dimensional extended sources. Software was written to access the three-dimensional information from computer graphics models in the formats of *.dxf and *.3ds and use these to generate synthetic cross-correlations, as if they would have been generated by an aperture synthesis antenna/receiver array measuring the radiometric emission from the three-dimensional object. A three-dimensional (near-field) aperture synthesis imaging algorithm generates [1] a voxel image of the three-dimensional object. Images created from a sphere indicate faithful reproduction about a single phase centre when the radius of the sphere is less than the Fresnel scale. However, for larger spheres, definition in the threedimensional imagery suffers and a phenomenon, referred to in this paper as Fresnel noise, appears in the image. Images of objects larger than the Fresnel scale can be created by having multiple smaller images, each having a size approximately of the Fresnel scale and centred on separate phase centres. Using the software to generate threedimensional imagery of a person, to demonstrate capabilities for portal security screening, indicates the technique works to first order. Improvements are needed in the software to improve the spatial sampling of the radiometric fields from the three-dimensional objects and implement a volumetric image mosaicking technique to remove the Fresnel noise.