SCOPE: Cooperative Integrated Communications and Sensing for Material Classification at Sub-Terahertz Frequencies

In this letter, we propose SCOPE—a novel, entropy-weighted ensembling approach for material classification at sub-Terahertz (THz) frequencies. Unlike existing methods that primarily use dedicated radars, SCOPE builds upon an integrated communication and sensing system and leverages information from both penetrating and reflected signals to enhance spatial resolution and detection accuracy across environments. We adopted spatial variability augmentation (SVA) to address the challenge of generalization across varying transmission distances and antenna gains. While most prior works are limited to radar systems or simulations, SCOPE is implemented and validated in a real sub-THz system working with a 10 GHz bandwidth. Our assessments across different sensing distances, antenna gains, and channel conditions demonstrate the efficacy of SCOPE, which reaches up to 99% accuracy in detecting five materials—glass, wood, metal, air, and plastic—outperforming existing techniques. To facilitate reproducibility, our dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/kfoysalhaque/SCOPE.