Walk-through screening system enhances security at airports nationwide

A brand new safety screener that individuals can merely stroll previous might quickly be coming to an airport close to you. Final 12 months, U.S. airports nationwide started adopting HEXWAVE—a commercialized walkthrough safety screening system based mostly on microwave imaging expertise developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory—to fulfill a brand new Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) mandate for enhanced worker screening to detect metallic and nonmetallic threats. The TSA is now within the means of evaluating HEXWAVE as a possible alternative of metallic detectors to display screen PreCheck passengers.

Sometimes, while you arrive at an airport safety checkpoint line, you place your carry-on gadgets on the conveyor belt, take away your sneakers and any metallic gadgets, and enter a physique scanner. As you maintain nonetheless for a number of seconds along with your toes unfold aside and your arms prolonged over your head, the scanner creates a generic, featureless 3D physique define revealing any metallic or nonmetallic hid weapons or different prohibited gadgets.

Requiring people to cease, take away clothes and belongings, and pose for scans impedes site visitors move in airports and different extremely populated venues, comparable to stadiums, procuring malls, mass transit stations, and faculties. To allow extra environment friendly screening of unstructured crowds and guarantee public security, the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) Science and Expertise Directorate (S&T) sponsored Lincoln Laboratory to prototype a high-resolution imaging system able to scanning folks and their belongings as they stroll by.

This R&D effort was carried out as a part of S&T’s Floor Transportation Explosive Risk Detection Program, which goals to offer the surface-transportation finish person–group (e.g., mass transit) with a layered and built-in functionality to detect menace gadgets on the velocity of the touring public.

The laboratory’s prototype microwave imager, which consists of a set of antennas put in on flat panels, operates below the identical elementary precept as current physique scanners: low-energy radio waves (much less highly effective than these transmitted by a cellphone) are transmitted from antennas towards an individual’s physique and replicate off pores and skin and any hidden objects; the mirrored waves return to the antennas and are processed by a pc to create a picture, which safety personnel then evaluate to determine any potential hid threats.

The novelty of the laboratory’s invention lies in its potential to discreetly deal with a continuing stream of topics in movement, measuring every topic in a short time (inside tens of milliseconds) and reconstructing 3D microwave photos of every topic at a video price. To fulfill these difficult necessities, the laboratory workforce developed a cheap antenna array and environment friendly image-reconstruction algorithms.

In comparison with current methods, the laboratory’s 3D microwave imager runs 100 occasions sooner utilizing the identical computing {hardware}. In 2017, the workforce demonstrated the prototype’s potential to detect varied simulated menace gadgets at various distances on a rail platform on the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) Emergency Coaching Heart in Boston.

“The aim of our work is to offer safety workers with more practical instruments to guard public areas. To that finish, microwave imaging expertise can shortly and unobtrusively present visibility of things carried right into a venue,” says William Moulder, who led the expertise’s improvement at Lincoln Laboratory.

In 2018, the safety firm Liberty Protection licensed the imaging expertise and entered right into a cooperative analysis and improvement settlement (CRADA) with Lincoln Laboratory. Transitioning expertise to trade for commercialization is a part of the laboratory’s function as a federally funded analysis and improvement middle, and CRADAs present a mechanism for such transition to occur.

By way of the CRADA, Liberty Protection maintained Lincoln Laboratory’s core image-reconstruction mental property and made the expertise enhancements required for commercialization, together with a completely new {hardware} structure, radio frequency (RF) antenna modules, and a transceiver system that meets Federal Communications Fee waveform and RF efficiency necessities for indoor and out of doors operation.

The co-organizational workforce facilitating the transition of the expertise was acknowledged by the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Expertise Switch with a 2019 Excellence in Expertise Switch Award for the Northeast area.

By 2021, Liberty Protection had prototyped a walk-through safety screening system, HEXWAVE. That very same 12 months, by the TSA’s On-Individual Screening Functionality Program, Liberty Protection obtained a contract award to reveal HEXWAVE’s enhanced threat-detection and high-throughput capabilities for screening aviation employees. Following profitable testing of HEXWAVE at sports activities complexes, leisure arenas, and procuring facilities, each nationally and internationally, Liberty Protection started providing the product on the market.

“HEXWAVE is a superb instance of how federally funded R&D will be efficiently transitioned to trade to satisfy real-world safety wants,” says Asha Rajagopal, the laboratory’s chief expertise switch officer. “By working with Liberty Protection, we helped speed up the supply of a important functionality into the palms of these defending public areas.”

In 2023, TSA started testing HEXWAVE as a possible alternative of metallic detectors used to display screen passengers in TSA PreCheck lanes. Airports throughout the US began deploying HEXWAVE in 2024 to satisfy the TSA’s worker screening mandate by the April 2026 deadline. Liberty Protection notes varied different markets for HEXWAVE; the primary models for business purposes had been delivered to Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory in 2023, and the expertise has since been deployed at different nationwide labs, correctional amenities, authorities buildings, and courthouses.

“Liberty was extraordinarily lucky to license the expertise from MIT Lincoln Laboratory,” says Invoice Frain, CEO of Liberty Protection. “From the outset, they have been a real companion—bringing not solely deep innovation and technical experience, but in addition a transparent imaginative and prescient for business deployment. Collectively, we have efficiently introduced next-generation expertise to market to assist defend folks in public areas.”

This story is republished courtesy of MIT Information (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a well-liked web site that covers information about MIT analysis, innovation and educating.