X-ray Baggage Inspection System Design

SANTEZ Project No: 00754-STZ-2010-2

Project Team : Abdullah Akay , Ulas Vural and Dr. Yusuf Sinan Akgul.

Noninvasive content viewing systems have found many applications in today's world including medical imaging, industrial inspection, military applications, and package scanning for security applications. X-ray based scanning systems are the most common due to their relatively low cost and high transportability.

X-ray based package scanners are most useful for the security of the public places such as airports and shopping malls. Therefore, there is a very large Research and Development (RD) community on this area. In addition, the market that exploits the technology produced by this RD is very large and grows at a very fast rate. Although the domestic market is large and still grows substantially for Turkey, the RD work on this area is not at the desired levels. In fact, there are almost no X-ray based scanners developed in Turkey. This situation results in a very big dependency on the imported goods and services for Turkey.

One of the main motivations for the proposed project is the design and development of a prototype x- ray based package scanning system including the hardware and software components. At first, the x- ray source and the sensors will be imported from abroad but later they will also be replaced by comparable devices developed by the partner firm. The project partner firm has experience on the production of x-rays sources and we plan to capitalize on their knowledge. The software part of the scanner device will be completely developed at the partner institutions and hence we expect the final scanner device to cost much less than the imported scanner devices. This low cost will bring significant market advantage for the partner firm when it first introduces the devices.

The other motivation for the proposed project is academic oriented. The x-ray based scanners have been employed since 1920s. Although the fundamental technology is based on propagating the x ray through the materials, there have been numerous improvements on this field such as Computer Tomography (CT). CT is a very attractive technology because it can give precise information about the volume elements of materials. However, the still high costs of CT devices and their relatively large physical sizes make them impractical for many applications. There are alternative methods such as stereoscopic x-ray imaging which is not as expensive as the CT technology. The literature includes methods that use stereo x-ray scans to feed the direct image to the operator for a feeling of depth. However, this feeling cannot be converted to solid 3D data. With the proposed project, we plan to bring new methods from the computer vision area and apply them to solve object depth problems after some development. The degree of precision and the reliability of the 3D data will be available during the project.

Keywords

Noninvasive content viewing, X-ray, baggage inspection, scanning systems, image based security, human-computer interraction