MagLens: Bringing Mobile, Fine-Grained Imaging to Ferrous Building Structures

Abstract

Ferrous structures — steel rebars, pipes, conduits — are embedded invisibly inside walls, floors, and ceilings of virtually every modern building. Locating them precisely is critical for safe drilling, structural inspection, and infrastructure maintenance, yet existing tools (stud finders, ground-penetrating radar) are bulky, expensive, or limited in resolution.

MagLens turns a mobile device into a high-resolution magnetic imager for ferrous building structures. By sweeping a handheld magnetometer array across a surface and fusing the resulting field measurements, MagLens reconstructs a fine-grained map of hidden ferromagnetic objects — revealing the position, shape, and depth of rebars and other structural elements without any special infrastructure. This capability opens the door to a range of safety-critical inspection and construction applications.

Key Contributions

• First mobile system for fine-grained magnetic imaging of ferrous structures inside buildings.
• Handheld, commodity hardware — no specialized or stationary equipment required.
• Reconstructs hidden rebar layout, shape, and depth from surface magnetic field scans.
• Enables safety-critical applications: pre-drill checks, structural health monitoring, renovation planning.

Demo

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wang2026maglens,
  title     = {MagLens: Bringing Mobile, Fine-Grained Imaging to Ferrous Building Structures},
  author    = {Wang, Jike and Iravantchi, Yasha and Wang, Mingke and Sample, Alanson and Shin, Kang Geun and Wang, Xinbing and Chen, Dongyao},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys)},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {ACM}
}