Passive millimeter-wave band data acquisition setup and associated image processing techniques

Surveillance systems that are effective and functional even during harsh weather conditions are essential for many applications. The main advantage of utilizing electromagnetic waves beyond the visual spectrum in millimeter and sub-millimeter wave band for imaging purposes is their robust and almost lossless propagation through mediums that are not accessible by conventional optical systems, such as smoke, snow, fog and sand storms. Unfortunately, sensing equipment that operates in that band is complex and further requires bulky mechanical setups for image acquisition. In this work, we present our setup for passive millimeter-wave data acquisition and its associated modules. The main focus of the current work is the image processing and data visualization techniques that are further applied to the acquired data to obtain human comprehensible images.