Professor Yingying Chen and ECE Ph.D. students Chen Wang and Jian Liu have won the Best Paper Award at the 2018 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (IEEE CNS) for their work on non-intrusive in-baggage suspicious object detection using commodity WiFi.
In recent years, the portable dangerous objects such as lethal weapons, homemade bombs and explosive chemicals have posed an increasing threat to public security. To detect the existence of such objects, Professor Chen's team proposes to utilize the fine-grained channel state information (CSI) from off-the-shelf WiFi to detect objects that are suspected to be dangerous (e.g., any metal or liquid objects) without compromising privacy through physically opening the baggage. The proposed suspicious object detection system significantly reduces the deployment cost and is easy to set up in public venues such as museums, theme parks, stadiums and schools. Particularly, the ECE team detects the existence of suspicious objects and identifies the dangerous material type based on the reconstructed CSI complex values. It further determines the risk level of the object by examining the object’s dimension (e.g., liquid volume and metal object’s shape), which is estimated based on the WiFi signals reflected by the object.
IEEE CNS provides a premier forum for security researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and users to exchange ideas, techniques and tools, raise awareness, and share experience related to all practical and theoretical aspects of cybersecurity. More information about the conference can be found at http://cns2018.ieee-cns.org/.
Congratulations to Yingying, Chen and Jian on this accomplishment!