Real-time concealed-object detection and recognition with passive millimeter wave imaging

Millimeter wave (MMW) imaging is finding rapid adoption in security applications such as concealed object detection under clothing. A passive MMW imaging system can operate as a stand-off type sensor that scans people in both indoors and outdoors. However, the imaging system often suffers from the diffraction limit and the low signal level. Therefore, suitable intelligent image processing algorithms would be required for automatic detection and recognition of the concealed objects. This paper proposes real-time outdoor concealed-object detection and recognition with a radiometric imaging system. The concealed object region is extracted by the multi-level segmentation. A novel approach is proposed to measure similarity between two binary images. Principal component analysis (PCA) regularizes the shape in terms of translation and rotation. A geometric-based feature vector is composed of shape descriptors, which can achieve scale and orientation-invariant and distortion-tolerant property. Class is decided by minimum Euclidean distance between normalized feature vectors. Experiments confirm that the proposed methods provide fast and reliable recognition of the concealed object carried by a moving human subject.