PNNL

Abstract

We describe experimental results on the detection of explosives residues using active hyperspectral imaging by illumination of the target surface using an external cavity quantum cascade laser (ECQCL) and imaging using a room temperature microbolometer camera. The active hyperspectral imaging technique forms an image hypercube by recording one image for each tuning step of the ECQCL. The resulting hyperspectral image contains the full absorption spectrum produced by the illumination laser at each pixel in the image which can then be used to identify the explosive type and relative quantity using spectral identification approaches developed initially in the remote sensing community.