On the Impact of Using X-Ray Energy Response Imagery for Object Detection via Convolutional Neural Networks

Bhowmik, N.; Gaus, Y.F.A.; Breckon, T.P.

Abstract

Automatic detection of prohibited items within complex and cluttered X-ray security imagery is essential to maintaining transport security, where prior work on automatic prohibited item detection focus primarily on pseudo-colour (rgb) X-ray imagery. In this work we study the impact of variant X-ray imagery, i.e., X-ray energy response (high, low) and effectivez compared to rgb, via the use of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for the joint object detection and segmentation task posed within X-ray baggage security screening. We evaluate state-of-the-art CNN architectures (Mask R-CNN, YOLACT, CARAFE and Cascade Mask R-CNN) to explore the transferability of models trained with such ‘raw’ variant imagery between the varying X-ray security scanners that exhibits differing imaging geometries, image resolutions and material colour profiles. Overall, we observe maximal detection performance using CARAFE, attributable to training using combination of rgb, high, low, and effective-z Xray imagery, obtaining 0.7 mean Average Precision (mAP) for a six class object detection problem. Our results also exhibit a remarkable degree of generalisation capability in terms of cross-scanner transferability (AP: 0.835/0.611) for a one class object detection problem by combining rgb, high, low, and effective-z imagery.

Citation

Bhowmik, N., Gaus, Y., & Breckon, T. (2021). On the Impact of Using X-Ray Energy Response Imagery for Object Detection via Convolutional Neural Networks.

• Conference Name: International Conference on Image Processing
• Conference Location: Anchorage, AK
• Start Date: Sep 19, 2021
• End Date: Sep 22, 2021
• Acceptance Date: May 20, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Sep 19, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021-09
• Deposit Date: Jun 24, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 23, 2021
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Publisher URL: https://www.2021.ieeeicip.org/
• Related Public URLs: http://breckon.eu/toby/publications/papers/bhowmik21energy.pdf