Detecting terahertz signatures using Guided Under-determined Source Signal Separation

Terahertz technology has seen many advances over the past decades. Special interest for the use of this technology is directed to the detection of illegal drugs, explosives and other hazardous materials. These materials exhibit characteristic signatures at terahertz wavelengths which may be used to identify them. In this paper we present a method for detecting the presence of chemicals and other materials using their terahertz signatures and a technique for signature recognition called Guided Under-determined Source Signal Separation (GUSSS). The method was tested using a public THz database, achieving high true positive and true negative percentages.