From: *Travis* Date: Mon, Dec 29, 2008 Subject: UT professor refines art of looking behind walls
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/12/14/1214innovator.html UT professor refines art of looking behind walls Doppler radar technology being adapted to identify hidden objects, watch people surreptitiously. By Dan Zehr <[email protected]> AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Sunday, December 14, 2008 Hao Ling can see through walls. His X-ray vision is a little blurry right now, but he's sharpening it with the help of a team of researchers at the University of Texas. Ling, an electrical engineering professor at UT, is one of handful of experts nationwide researching radar technologies that eventually could help soldiers, police and rescue workers locate human movement on the other side of walls or inside crumbled buildings. His latest project is funded by a National Science Foundation program aimed at developing fresh ways to combat roadside bombs and other terrorist activity. Ling and his team at UT are researching ways to take Doppler radar technology — the same basic systems meteorologists use to track storms — and put it to work identifying people as they move around in places the naked eye can't see. The goal is to transform waves the radar produces into understandable images of whoever is behind the wall. The research is still in the early stages, but the potential is easy to see. Future systems could help in situations such as the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, where police needed to know where the attackers were holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. It could help soldiers in Iraq detect whether someone is hiding in a house, and whether they have a gun. It could help a rescue workers pinpoint a survivor struggling under the rubble left in a tornado's path. Ling, 49, is one of the country's pre-eminent experts in his niche of radar research. He is also part of Austin's community of innovators — the researchers and entrepreneurs whose new ideas could someday produce solutions to problems as such as global warming, disease prevention and using technology to make the country safer. Austin likes to bill itself as a city of ideas, and these innovators are at the core of that reputation. Cutting-edge basic research is the ground floor for Austin's growth economies. It's the platform for applied research, which can turn technological innovation into new companies and jobs. "If you don't have that base, you don't get to play at the next level," said Pike Powers, an Austin lawyer and longtime player in building the city's high-technology foundation. In his lab at UT's Pickle Research Campus, Ling and his team bounce radar signals off people as they walk, run or crawl around the room. They built a makeshift cinder-block wall so they can run tests that track people moving on the other side. Unlike the optical waves that produce human sight, certain radar signals can penetrate walls. But the image produced by the radar looks more like some esoteric wave pattern than a visual image. The systems can't return a definitive picture of the person on the other side of the wall, let alone suggest what they might be up to. So researchers are working to develop a sort of radar brain that can take the feedback, filter out extraneous data and translate the results into an easily recognizable picture. Ling and his team at UT hope to use their physical experiments to craft a proven simulation program that radar experts can use to train those radar brains. Blending theory, pragmatism The human brain already is "trained to recognize, 'This is a scene. Here is a person walking,' " Ling said. "All that (optical) knowledge base is already between your ears. "The unfortunate thing about radar is, it's an unfamiliar thing for a person to recognize," he said. "It's starting from ground zero, so you have to train it to make it understandable." When Ling came to UT in 1986, he already was a rising star in electromagnetics, colleagues and former students said. He finished his doctoral work at the University of Illinois and came out with what colleagues described as a rare balance of the theoretical and the pragmatic. Unlike many researchers who see only the intricacies of their research, they said, Ling also could see the practical application of his work. "That's a combination of skills that, frankly, not a lot of people have," said Robert Rogers, a research engineer at UT's Applied Research Laboratories . Ling sat on Rogers' doctoral dissertation committee. "He never tries to grandstand or snowball anybody with what he knows, although he easily could," Rogers said. "He tries to bring people up to his level. I think that's the mark of a good teacher." Ling, who moved with his family from Taiwan to Maryland when he was 13, had started to strike that balance during his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His first major was physics, and he added electrical engineering around his junior year. Electromagnetism gave him the best combination of his interest in engineering and his passion for physics. "In some ways, it's sort of God's rule versus man-made rule," Ling said. "Usually, engineering is about designing things, but in some ways physics is sort of unveiling what nature lets you do. I've been more interested in uncovering what nature lets you do." Challenges of detail, radar noise His current project has roots in the Persian Gulf War and the dozens of friendly-fire incidents that occurred. Frustrated by the difficulty of identifying certain targets, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratories and other federal agencies launched programs to improve radar-detection techniques. One key problem stemmed from the interference that the moving parts of a vehicle would cause on a Doppler radar's feedback. When a police officer bounces a radar wave off a car, its frequency changes — increasing if the vehicle moves closer and decreasing if it moves away. But police radar only needs to find the vehicle's speed. The technical challenges grow when the objective is to track a vehicle over distance or identify it as friend or foe. That work often is muddled by smaller wave patterns, called micro-Dopplers, generated by the moving parts of a larger body. Imagine, for example, the feedback a helicopter's rotors would generate in addition to the signal from the chopper as a whole. "They were almost a nuisance in the image," Ling said, "so I wanted to find ways to extract something useful out of these micro-Dopplers." He's one of a relatively small and obscure group of researchers who have taken up that task. Backed by the National Science Foundation grant, Ling and his team at UT have taken a somewhat different approach to the problem. Rather than just test different hardware and software models, they hope to craft a program that would simulate the wide variety of wave patterns created by people in motion. "That in a sense illustrates what we're after: outside-the-box ideas," said Bruce Hamilton, director of the National Science Foundation program funding Ling's research. "We're not trying to compete with the Department of Defense. The idea was to really open up a new window, namely to academic researchers who might otherwise not be involved." Defining the possible If all goes well, Ling and his team could prove the accuracy of the simulation with actual testing. With that work in place, they could turn the program loose to train radar systems to translate the feedback they receive. In theory, these radar systems could track people in a hostage situation as they moved and identify those who were carrying weapons. Troops in urban combat could identify threats inside buildings before barging in. With that knowledge, users could craft better plans for handling different situations, said Chao Lu, a micro-Doppler researcher and acting dean of Towson University's College of Graduate Studies and Research . That's the driving push behind much of this radar research. "It's an estimate; you never know exactly" what's going on if you don't have a line of sight into a room, Lu said. "But it can make a difference if people are walking around in the room carrying a weapon or if they're empty-handed. That type of movement would be different on the radar." For now, Ling and his team can track a person moving on the other side of their wall. They can point out the parts of the resulting micro-Doppler wave pattern that relate to a person's torso, arms, legs or a stick they're carrying. But even to their trained eyes, there's a wide gap between their wave patterns and a full identification of what's on the other side. But then that's why Ling got into this work: to seek out the boundaries nature has set and to go "exploring the art of the possible," as he said. After all, he said, nothing in engineering and physics theory says it's impossible to build a radar system that will help him see through walls. "Optical is electromagnetic radiation," he said. "Radar is electromagnetic radiation, but at different frequencies. \u2026 The sexiness of using radar is, you can do through-wall detection. 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