SquiggleMilli: Approximating SAR Imaging on Mobile Millimeter-Wave Devices
Hem Regmi, Sabbir Saadat, Sanjib Sur
Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina

SquiggleMilli is the first system to enable 3D mmWave imaging with a free-hand, squiggle device motion.
Awards
- Best Poster Honorable Mention, ACM UbiComp, 2021
- Best Poster Runner-up Award, ACM HotMobile, 2021
Overview
This paper proposes SquiggleMilli, a system that approximates traditional Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging on mobile millimeter-wave (mmWave) devices. The system is capable of imaging through obstructions, such as clothing, and under low visibility conditions. Unlike traditional SAR that relies on mechanical controllers or rigid bodies, SquiggleMilli is based on the hand-held, fluidic motion of the mmWave device. It enables mmWave imaging in hand-held settings by re-thinking existing motion compensation, compressed sensing, and voxel segmentation. Since mmWave imaging suffers from poor resolution due to specularity and weak reflectivity, the reconstructed shapes could be imperceptible by machines and humans. To this end, SquiggleMilli designs a machine learning model to recover the high spatial frequencies in the object to reconstruct an accurate 2D shape and predict its 3D features and category. We have customized SquiggleMilli for security applications, but the model is adaptable to other applications with limited training samples. We implement SquiggleMilli on off-the-shelf components and demonstrate its performance improvement over the traditional SAR qualitatively and quantitatively.
Publications
- SquiggleMilli: Approximating SAR Imaging on Mobile Millimeter-Wave Devices
Hem Regmi, Moh Sabbir Saadat, Sanjib Sur, Srihari Nelakuditi
IMWUT’21 Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Virtual, September 2021. [Paper] [Slides] [Talk] - 🏆 ViSAR: A Mobile Platform for Vision-Integrated Millimeter-Wave Synthetic Aperture Radar
Jacqueline M Schellberg, Sanjib Sur
UbiComp-ISWC’21 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Virtual, September 2021. [Paper] [Poster] (Best Poster Honorable Mention) - 🏆 ZigZagCam: Pushing the Limits of Hand-held Millimeter-Wave Imaging
Hem Regmi, Moh Sabbir Saadat, Sanjib Sur, Srihari Nelakuditi
HotMobile’21 ACM International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, Virtual, February 2021. [Paper] [Poster] (Best Poster Runner-up Award)