We have performed research to understand the feasibility of using signals received by EOIR sensors to detect small vibrations in surfaces illuminated by sunlight. The vibration models consider buildings with vibrating roofs, as well as ground vibrations due to buried structures. For the surface buildings, we investigated two approaches. One involved treating the roof as an elastic medium subject to deformation resulting in a PDE whose solution describes the fluctuation in the surface’s normal direction vector. The second approach treated the roof as a rigid mass subject to motion in six degrees of freedom, while modeling the dynamics of the building’s frame, and tuning the parameters to result in resonant frequencies similar to real buildings (~3-7 Hz). We applied the appropriate physical models of reflected and scattered light to various surfaces, specular (insulator or conductor), rough but still reflective, or diffusely scattering (Lambertian). Matlab code was developed to perform numerical simulations of any system configuration described above and easily add new models. The main engine of the code is a signal calculator and analyzer that sums the total intensity of received light over a “scene” with a variety of surface materials, orientations, polarization (if any), and other parameters. A resulting signal versus time is generated that may be analyzed in order to: 1) optimize sensitivity, or 2) detect the vibration signature of a structure of interest. The results of this study will enable scientists/engineers to optimize signal detection, possibly from space, for passive exploitation of scattered light modulated by vibrating surfaces.

Date Published: 12 September 2014
PDF: 19 pages
Proc. SPIE 9219, Infrared Remote Sensing and Instrumentation XXII, 92190E (12 September 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2060212

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9219:
Infrared Remote Sensing and Instrumentation XXII
Marija Strojnik Scholl; Gonzalo Páez, Editor(s)