Radar detection of underground explosives: US Pat. No. 7,701,379

U.S. Patent No. 7,701,379, issued on April 20, 2010 to TiaLinx, Inc. of Irvine, CA, discloses a radar system for imaging structures buried below ground or on the other side of a wall.

According to the patent, ground penetrating radar (GPR) systems use a transceiver which emits radar signals and detects reflected signals as the transceiver is scanned across an area over the object to be imaged/detected (e.g., improvised explosive devices or IEDs).  However, the scanning movement can distort the resulting radar images.  The patent discloses a system and method for compensating for such movement and variations in the movement to produce improved radar image quality.

 TiaLinx’s website describes the company as developing state-of-the-art millimeter-wave ultra-wideband (UWB) radio-frequency (RF) imaging devices for a variety of civilian and defense applications.  The company produces the “Eagle” line of UWB RF imaging devices, including the “Eagle60″ system, described as being a handheld and portable scanner capable of imaging objects and detecting movement (e.g., behind a wall) with resolution of a few millimeters, and the “Eagle5-BH” system, described as a lightweight imager capable of probing movement within underground tunnels and uplinking the data remotely to a monitoring station.   

The press releases on TiaLinx’s website also state that the company has received 32 U.S. patents.  Some of these listings by TiaLinx are actually applications that have only received notices of allowance to date (indicating that patents are expected to issue upon payment of the issue fee and barring any other impediments), so I would expect that there will likely be more TiaLinx patents on the way.