Detecting Prohibited Items in X-Ray Images: A Contour Proposal Learning Approach

X-ray baggage screening plays a vital role in aviation security. Manual inspection of potentially anomalous items is challenging due to the clutter and occlusion within Xray scans. Here, we address this issue by presenting an object-boundaries driven framework for the automated detection of suspicious items from X-ray baggage scans. Rather than recognizing objects directly from the X-ray images, our two-stage detection approach first extracts contour-based proposals using a novel cascaded structure tensor technique and subsequently passes the candidate proposals to a single feed-forward convolutional neural network for recognition. Thorough experimentation on GDXray and SIXray datasets demonstrates that the proposed model achieves a mean area under the curve of 0.9878, outperforming the existing renown state-of-the-art object detection frameworks.