More efficient cost-effective hand-held methods of inspecting packages without opening them are in demand for security. Recent new work in TeraHertz sources,1 millimeter waves, presents new possibilities. Millimeter waves pass through cardboard and styrofoam, common packing materials, and also pass through most materials except those with high conductivity like metals which block light and are easily spotted. Estimating refractive index along the path of the beam through the package from observations of the beam passing out of the package provides the necessary information to inspect the package and is a nonlinear problem. So we use a generalized linear inverse technique that we first developed for finding oil by reflection in geophysics.2 The computation assumes parallel slices in the packet of homogeneous material for which the refractive index is estimated. A beam is propagated through this model in a forward computation. The output is compared with the actual observations for the package and an update computed for the refractive indices. The loop is repeated until convergence. The approach can be modified for a reflection system or to include estimation of absorption.

Date Published: 3 September 2008
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 7072, Optics and Photonics for Information Processing II, 70720H (3 September 2008);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7072:
Optics and Photonics for Information Processing II
Abdul Ahad Sami Awwal; Khan M. Iftekharuddin; Bahram Javidi, Editor(s)