Portable Sub-Terahertz Radar for Rapid Long-range Detecting Concealed Carried Threat

Abstract

Rapidly discriminating potential threat in crowd scenarios from a long distance at an early stage is much helpful to avoid damage to public. Utilizing depolarization effect of different targets, a portable 0.14THz radar prototype is developed to detect the concealed body-worn weapons. This paper illustrates the schematic of system and proposes a fast algorithm to verify the performance. The prototype used a linear frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) waveform with a sweep range from 134.4GHz to 138.4GHz and the sweep pulse width of 100us. The signal is transmitted by one horizontal antenna and received by two antennas, one of which is horizontal polarization and the other is vertical. The experiments results show that the developed prototype could detect the metal gun and improvised explosive devices successfully. The performance could be improved by tuning detection parameters and increasing the antenna aperture potentially as well.