Differential Reflection Spectroscopy: A Novel Method for Explosive Detection

In the aftermath of the recent terrorist attacks, there has been an increasing need for automated, high-speed detection technologies that can detect trace amounts of explosives without human intervention. Our group at the University of Florida has developed differential reflection spectroscopy which can detect explosive residue on surfaces such as parcel, cargo and luggage. In this differential reflection device, explosives show spectral finger-prints at specific wavelengths, for example, the spectrum of 2,4,6, trinitrotoluene shows an absorption edge at 420 nm. Additionally, we have developed a support vector machine based computer software to classify the explosives and non-explosive materials. In this study we will (i) describe this system and give an insight into the operation of our prototype, (ii) demonstrate our software for the detection of the spectral finger-prints, and (iii) discuss the normalization of the data which significantly increases classification rates and decreases the number of parameters.