Engineers Say They've Created a Way to Detect Bombs and Guns Using Basic Wifi

Re:Engineers Say They've Created a Way to Detect Bombs and G... by Animats on Thursday August 16, 2018 @02:18PM (#17777228)

The paper [1] is interesting, although they spend too much space writing about the purported benefits. The concept here is to exploit WiFi gear's usages of many different frequencies. Measuring the amplitude and phase shift on each channel provides some info about what each channel bounced off of and diffracted around.

Inevitably, they then dump all the data into a neural net. They trained on about 15 objects, which is a reasonable start. They didn't go on to testing with enough objects to be useful. "The results show that our system can detect over 95% dangerous objects in different types of bags and successfully identify 90% dangerous material types." By "dangerous" they just mean metal or liquid. It's not like they can tell a gun from a soup can.

[1] http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~yychen/papers/Towards%20In%20...

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Re:Engineers Say They've Created a Way to Detect Bombs and G... by fake-name on Thursday August 16, 2018 @03:23PM (#17777723)

> The concept here is to exploit WiFi gear's usages of many different frequencies. Measuring the amplitude and phase shift on each channel provides some info about what each channel bounced off of and diffracted around.

This exists. They're just reimplemented non-cooperative SFCW radar. It's not new.

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