Multi-class 3D object detection within volumetric 3D computed tomography baggage security screening imagery

Automatic detection of prohibited objects within passenger baggage is important for aviation security. X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) based 3D imaging is widely used in airports for aviation security screening whilst prior work on automatic prohibited item detection focus primarily on 2D X-ray imagery. Whilst some prior work has proven the possibility of extending deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) based automatic prohibited item detection from 2D X-ray imagery to volumetric 3D CT baggage security screening imagery, it focuses on the detection of one specific type of objects (e.g., either bottles or handguns). As a result, multiple models are needed if more than one type of prohibited item is required to be detected in practice. In this paper, we consider the detection of multiple object categories of interest using one unified framework. To this end, we formulate a more challenging multi-class 3D object detection problem within 3D CT imagery and propose a viable solution (3D RetinaNet) to tackle this problem. To enhance the performance of detection we investigate a variety of strategies including data augmentation and varying backbone networks. Experimentation carried out to provide both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the proposed approach to multi-class 3D object detection within 3D CT baggage security screening imagery. Experimental results demonstrate the combination of the 3D RetinaNet and a series of favorable strategies can achieve a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 65.3% over five object classes (i.e. bottles, handguns, binoculars, glock frames, iPods). The overall performance is affected by the poor performance on glock frames and iPods due to the lack of data and their resemblance with the baggage clutter