From what I understand of the technology, it doesn't really see through clothing, does it? Looking through the thread I couldn't find any photos that showed anything like what the MMW machines show. It looked much more like a glorified video camera (junk science?) to me. If I'm wrong in my take on the technology, then my 4th amd. view might change.
Let me try again. Both the passive scanner and the active one "see" through clothing, in the same way that a digital camera "sees" a landscape. A digital camera doesn't really record "a picture", it records a bunch of numbers that correspond (in a complicated way) to the colour and intensity of the light hitting the detector at each pixel. Software turns that bunch of numbers back into an image on your computer monitor. If I open the jpeg file with Notepad, I'd see a bunch of numbers. I wouldn't be able to tell whether it was a landscape or your kid's birthday party.
In a similar way, the mmw scanners (whether active or passive) record digital information of the intensity of the radio energy bouncing off your body (under your clothes) at each pixel of the scene. The manufacturer then has a choice: to turn that information into a picture on a monitor (like your camera does) or to search through it for patterns that indicate something artificial is under your clothes. As I said above, that involves a technical decision about whether a human is better at picking up an anomaly than the computer is. The manufacturers of the passive scanner have chosen the second option. They also have a regular digital camera that takes a regular photo, and the software then puts a marker on top of that photo in the location where the mmw sensor found something under the clothes.
(OT - there was a research effort some years ago to automatically identify pornographic digital pictures by analysing how many of the pixels were some shade of pink.
Didn't really work (for many reasons) but it
was an example of analysing a picture without someone having to look at it.)
Just explaining here, okay? I don't support the use of
any scanners before the checkpoint, and think that if a scanner is used
at the checkpoint, the display should be the type currently used by the passive scanner.
Originally Posted by
BubbaLoop
RadioGirl,
Thank you for that last post. Perfectly logical and crystal clear.
No worries (that's Aussie for "you're welcome").
Originally Posted by
goalie
emphasis mine: please don't use the tsa and phrases like ""perfectly logical" and "crystal clear" in the same sentence while i'm eating....
Oy! (That's Aussie for "hey!") She's talking about
me being perfectly logical and crystal clear. Which I am. And I am NOT TSA!
