A Novel 3D Seismic Sensor for Virtual Border Application

There are very few seismic-based early-warning systems on the market today. High level of FAR, bottlenecks at sensor to processing unit link levels, environment dependency and lack of targets classification and localization accuracy are drawbacks shadowing the strategic advantages of the concept. The new 3D seismic sensor for virtual border application, under development at Spider-Tech (Spider Technologies Security Ltd.), Israel, is addressing those drawbacks and paves the way to a seismic based early warning system with better performances to cost ratio than of other early-warning systems existing today. A new sensing element - an accelerometer, having low weight, small geometry and high performances, specially designed for this type of application, is used as building brick for the new sensor. The new proprietary concept combines differential acceleration measurement on each axis with a virtual single point 3D measurement. The integrated data processing hardware runs the detection, the noise cancellation, the DOA (direction of arrival) angle calculation and the target classification algorithms and has a strong impact on the amount of data transferred to the upper levels of the system. The use of the novel 3D sensor in the seismic based early- warning systems can help extend the sensor's detection range for human targets from minimal radius of 15 m to more than 30 m - depending on soil type, with detection rates exceeding 85% while maintaining an ultra low FAR (False Alarm Rate). When information from at least two sensors is combined, target localization precision can reach plusmn2 m at 15 m radius.