Masters Theses

Abstract

"Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are homemade, non-conventional explosive devices, which are used to destruct and incapacitate individuals and property. IEDs are becoming a popular weapon of attack among terrorists and insurgents due to their easy of making and capability to cause major damage. Hence, is has become necessary to develop efficient systems for detecting and disarming these devices. The Terahertz technology which uses electromagnetic radiations between 0.3 THz to 10 THz for imaging is one of the most recently developed detection techniques and is ideally suitable for detection of IEDs and similar devices. Although a lot of work has been done for developing a standoff detection system for detecting IEDs using Terahertz imaging, it is still needed to develop advanced techniques for processing of the THz data. In this thesis, efficient signal processing techniques are developed for standoff, real time and wide area detection of IEDs. The signal processing algorithm is a two stage algorithm where the first stage is a preprocessing stage. In this stage, THz data from a large field is given to the correlation filters which detect hotspots in the field where an IED could be present. This stage avoids the computational burden of processing data from the entire field in the second stage. In the second stage, THz data from the hotspots of stage one are unmixed to find the individual explosive materials in each data point/pixel. The unmixing is done using a variant of the Independent Component Analysis algorithm which separates only the required component. Once the components are separated, they are analyzed to see if any of them matches an explosive. Thus, the presence of an IED or explosive can be accurately determined within the field"--Abstract, page iii.

Advisor(s)

Sarangapani, Jagannathan, 1965-
Rao, Vittal S.

Committee Member(s)

Smith, Scott C.

Department(s)

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Degree Name

M.S. in Computer Engineering

Publisher

University of Missouri--Rolla

Publication Date

Fall 2007

Pagination

xv, 156 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (page 76).

Rights

© 2007 Amit Bipin Shah, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Subject Headings

Adaptive signal processing
Detectors
Improvised explosive devices -- Detection
Terahertz technology

Thesis Number

T 9952

Print OCLC #

794690155

Electronic OCLC #

779923142

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