Machine learning to help with searches for concealed weapons

A sample of shipping containers passing through the Port of Rotterdam is X-rayed. The resulting images are inspected by humans who search for anything suspicious - weapons for example. However, the process is time-consuming, so only a small fraction can be sampled.

The Computational Security Science (COMPASS) group at University College London (UCL), led by Lewis Griffin, may soon speed up the process by employing artificial intelligence. Dr Griffin is being sponsored by Rapiscan, who make the X-ray machines, to create software that uses machine-learning techniques to scan the x-ray images. Thomas Rogers, a member of the UCL team, estimates that it takes a human operator about ten minutes to examine each X-ray. The UCL system can do it in 3.5 seconds.

The work has been featured in the Economist magazine.