MilliWear — A Short Range InSAR Approach for Surface Wear Inspection using mm-Wave Radar

In-situ inspection of surface wear remains a daunting task for the industry. Detection of intermediate progressive dynamics of wear requires repeated examinations which is time-consuming, adding to mill downtime. Runtime inspection inside the mill necessitates the ability to sense through occluded media due to the presence of grinding dust. The primary objective of this work is to assess the feasibility of using short range interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) to detect and quantify wear or other tribological phenomena associated with metallic surfaces. A novel variable focusing algorithm has been used to generate SAR images and a unique automated co-registration scheme has been employed in the InSAR processing pipeline. The reconstructed SAR images and the generated interferogram reflect strong overlap with the ground truth of the sample under test with MSE of 0.0611.