Online monitoring of moving objects on conveyor belts using RF time domain imaging technique

In this paper, a novel time domain RF imaging technique is presented for online monitoring of moving objects over conveyor belts. The proposed technique provides the knowledge of electrical properties i.e., relative permittivity and thickness of material under test (MUT), in addition to the structural properties i.e., size and shape of the interrogated object. The foremost improvement of the proposed technique is that it does not require any reference material or a priori information of the test media for the reconstruction process. The proposed RF imaging technique is best suited for online monitoring, where the structural as well as the electrical properties of the test object can be obtained through nondestructive process without requiring any iterative algorithms.