Trace detection of explosive substances in hyperspectral imagery

In this work, we present a remote sensing system based on active infrared laser illumination for detection of explosive substances. The spectroscopy system comprises two tunable quantum cascade laser sources covering a total tuning range of 300 cm (-1) from 7.7 µm to 10 µm. A high performance mercury-cadmium-telluride infrared camera is used to collect the diffusely backscattered light. The resulting measurement data forms a hyperspectral image, where each pixel vector contains the bachscattering spectrum of a specific location in the scene. The image spectra are tested for contamination with target spectra including PETN, RDX, TNT and ammonium nitrate using the well-known adaptive matched subspace algorithm.