Microwave tomography for security applications

Microwave imaging technologies are widely researched in the biomedical field where they rely on the imaging of dielectric properties of tissues. Healthy and malignant tissues have different dielectric properties in the microwave frequency region, therefore, the dielectric properties of human body´s tissues are generally different from other contraband materials. Consequently the dielectric data analysis techniques using microwave signals can be used to distinguish between different types of materials that could be hidden in the human body, such as explosives or drugs. Other concerns raised about these particular imaging systems were how to build them cost effectively, with less radiation emissions, to overcome the disadvantages of X-ray imaging systems. This paper will discuss in details how microwave tomography scanning could overcome the challenge of imaging concealed objects in the human body and prove the concept of detecting lower values of dielectric properties using image reconstruction.