RIT Image-Processing Expert Poised to Help War Against Terrorism

The war against terrorism is unlike any war ever fought by the United States. Doing battle with a new and often times invisible enemy will require breakthrough technological tools—one of which will likely come from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering.

Raghuveer Rao, RIT Gleason professor of electrical engineering, has developed state-of-the-art image-enhancement technology that will benefit counter-terrorism, law enforcement, border patrol and medical fields.

Here’s how the technology works: software technology, using wavelet enhancement, filters visual clutter from X-ray, radar and infrared images. Resulting high-resolution images show sharper detail. Potential uses include concealed-weapons detection, through-the-wall surveillance and tumor detection, Rao says.

Using backscatter and transmission X-ray equipment to sharpen images, police and airport security officers can better see concealed weapons, border patrol agents may discover people hiding in the trunks of cars, doctors may detect cancerous tumors that might not be seen in unprocessed X-ray images and, using through-the-wall radar surveillance in hostage situations, SWAT teams will be able to detect movement and even breathing.

In controlled environments, such as courthouses and airports, the technology will supplement existing technology like metal detectors. In uncontrolled environments, such as crowds, the technology will provide information-gathering capability beyond the human eye. Testing in working situations is underway, Rao says, and numerous inquiries about the technology have been received since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

"We are poised to see image capture, enhancement and automatic-recognition technologies become indispensable tools in crime prevention and other areas in coming years," Rao says.

Research is funded by the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Air Force Research Lab. Private support came from American Science & Engineering Inc. of Massachusetts, a maker of X-ray inspection systems for airports, and Pixel Physics Inc. of Henrietta. Other partners include Analysis and Simulation Inc., ITT Industries Inc. and Stiefvater Consultants Inc.

Note: According to a national survey by U.S. News & World Report, RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering ranks fourth in the nation among undergraduate and graduate engineering programs, offering degrees in computer, electrical, industrial and systems, mechanical, and microelectronic engineering, applied statistics and engineering science. RIT was the first university to offer undergraduate degrees in microelectronic and software engineering.

Founded in 1829, RIT has one of the nation’s oldest and largest cooperative education programs. The engineering college is named for Kate Gleason, the first female bank president in the United States and daughter of William Gleason, founder of what became Rochester-based Gleason Corp. Kate Gleason was America’s first woman engineering student and the first woman elected a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.