Active X-ray testing of complex objects

摘要

X-ray testing of complex objects - such as luggage screening at airports - is usually performed manually. This is not always effective, since it depends strongly on the pose of the objects of interest (target objects) and occlusion, as well as human capabilities. Additionally, certain target objects are difficult to detect using only one viewpoint. For this reason, we have developed an active X-ray testing framework that is able to find an adequate viewpoint of the target object in order to obtain better X-ray images to analyse. The key idea of our method is to adapt automatically the viewpoint of the X-ray images in order to project the target object in poses where the detection performance should be higher. Thus, the detection inside complex objects can be performed in a more effective way. Using a robotic arm and a semiautomatic manipulator system, the robustness and reliability of the method have been verified in the automated detection of razor blades located inside nine different objects, showing promising preliminary results: in 130 experiments we were able to detect the razor blade 115 times with 10 false alarms, achieving a recall of 89% and a precision of 92%.