Threat Object Detection using Covariance Matrix Modeling in X-ray Images

The X-ray imaging system for the aviation security is one of the applications. In airports, all passengers and properties should be inspected and accepted by security machines before boarding on aircrafts to avoid all treat factors. That treat factors might be directly connected on terrorist threats awfully hazardous to not only passengers but also people in highly populated area such as major cities or buildings. Because the performance of the system is increasing along with the growth of IT technology, information that has various type and good quality can be provided for security check. However, human factors are mainly affected on the inspections. It means that human inspectors should be proficient corresponding to the growth of technology for efficient and effective inspection but there is clear limit of proficiency. Human being is not a computer. Because of the limitation, the aviation security techniques have the tendencies to provide not only numerous and nice information but also effective assistance for security inspectors. Many image processing applications already have been developed to provide efficient assistance for the security systems. Naturally, the security check procedure should not be altered by automatic software because it's not guaranteed that the automatic system will never make any mistake. This paper addressed an application of threat object detection using the covariance matrix modeling. The algorithm is implemented in MATLAB environment and evaluated the performance by comparing with other detection algorithms. Considering the shape of an object on an image is changed by the attitude of that to the imaging machine, the implemented detector has the robustness for rotation and scale of an object