Image recognition for x-ray luggage scanners using free and open source software

Abstract

This paper describes the status of a currently ongoing research and development project that proposes the implementation of a system to be connected to x-ray luggage scanning equipment used by the Airport Security Police (Policía de Seguridad Aeroportuaria, PSA), having as main objective to automatically recognize images obtained in real time from the scanners to alert the x-ray machine operators or screeners about those identified as threats (explosive devices, firearms, etc.) Technical instructions and source code of a web-service and auxiliary scripts developed for the evaluations were published on github in order to enable interested researchers, developers and other potential contributors to repeat or reproduce the training and testing summarized in this paper with freely available image data-sets.