Towards Practical Bi-Static Polarimetric Imaging Using Commodity mmWave Radars for Material Sensing

Abstract

Accurately identifying materials in real-world environments is critical for applications in robotics, security screening and autonomous systems. While more expensive approaches for material characterization such as spectroscopy or ellipsometry are ill-suited for large scale deployment, RF-based solutions present a new potential low-cost alternative. Prior RF-based material sensing approaches are either too invasive, suffer from lower resolution or are highly specialized in particular materials, presenting a need for a more general-purpose solution.