PORTEMVISION is a project funded by the national R&d spanish program (Ref. TEC2014-55290-JIN). In this page, you will find a global description of it including:
Should you need any additional information, please contact us.
Context of the project
This project is based on two main pillars: electromagnetic imaging and computer vision. They key points that are relevant about this fields are briefly described next. If you want to go into further detail about them, a good starting point is in the wikipedia and the references therein: electromagnetic imaging and computer vision.
Electromagnetic imaging
Human eyes are prepared to capture electromagnetic radiation in a given range of frequencies known as the visible spectrum. In other words, electromagnetic radiation is captured in a natural way to produce real-life images.
The previous fact has motivated the researchers along the years to generate images resembling the ones acquired by our eyes but at different frequencies. Each range of frequencies enables us to know different data about the object under test. For example, cameras prepared to work in the infrared are useful to estimate the temperature of a body.
It is well-known that the lowest the frequency, the highest the penetration capability. Thus, a building wall is usually opaque for the visible spectrum. However, the radiation emitted by a cell phone, which is in the range of the microwaves, can go through this kind of walls.
This penetration capabilities are specially interesting for many applications such as detecting concealed weapons under clothes or to have vision capabilities in a room filled by smoke. However, it is also relevant to observe that the lowest the frequency, the poorest the resolution of the image. Thus, researchers must establish a trade-off between resolution and penetration capabilities.
Computer vision
The computer vision field has suffered a new boost in the recent after the advent of smartphones. Thus, advances in camera calibration, detection of common features in textureless images and inclusion of inertial data have enabled a large number of astonishing applications that can run in standard smartphones.
Nevertheless, most of these techniques have never been applied to high resolution electromagnetic images as the popularization of the latter ones has become popular in the recent years.
It is also important to observe that computer vision is not among the skills of the researchers of the project. Hopefully, free and user-friendly tools are available to ease the acquisition of the desired data.
Project goals
In a nutshell, the main goal this project is to lay the foundations to develop portable electromagnetic scanners without the resolution of large scale scanners. Although technical details are beyond the scope of this text, some of the key points involve to take advantage of computer vision techniques during the processing of the images.
As a secondary goal, the scanner will be composed of a minimum number of low-complexity transmitters/receivers by exploiting techniques to use amplitude-only data as well as non-redundant positioning.
Funding scheme
The project is funded by the Spanish Minister of Economy and Competitivity under the program “R&D projects oriented to the challenges of the society” (retos de la sociedad). In particular, it belongs to the new subcall for young researchers. This subcall provides funds for projects led by young doctors without a permanent employment relationship.
It is worthwhile to mention that this modality has been highly competitive since there were received 1300 project applications but only 100 have been finally selected yielding a success rate under 8%.
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