Temporal Fusion Based Mutli-scale Semantic Segmentation for Detecting Concealed Baggage Threats

Detection of illegal and threatening items in baggage is one of the utmost security concern nowadays. Even for experienced security personnel, manual detection is a time-consuming and stressful task. Many academics have created automated frameworks for detecting suspicious and contraband data from X-ray scans of luggage. However, to our knowledge, no framework exists that utilizes temporal baggage X-ray imagery to effectively screen highly concealed and occluded objects which are barely visible even to the naked eye. To address this, we present a novel temporal fusion driven multi-scale residual fashioned encoder-decoder that takes series of consecutive scans as input and fuses them to generate distinct feature representations of the suspicious and non-suspicious baggage content, leading towards a more accurate extraction of the contraband data. The proposed methodology has been thoroughly tested using the publicly accessible GDXray dataset, which is the only dataset containing temporally linked grayscale X-ray scans showcasing extremely concealed contraband data. The proposed framework outperforms its competitors on the GDXray dataset on various metrics.
Comment: Accepted in IEEE SMC 2021