Data Augmentation of X-ray Images for Automatic Cargo Inspection of Nuclear Items

Haneol Jang, Chansuh Lee, Hansol Ko, Kyung Tae Lim

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

As part of establishing a management system to prevent the illegal transfer of nuclear items, automatic nuclear item detection technology is required during customs clearance. However, it is challenging to acquire X-ray images of major nuclear items (e.g., nuclear fuel and gas centrifuges) loaded in cargo with which to train a cargo inspection model. In this work, we propose a new means of data augmentation to alleviate the lack of X-ray training data. The proposed augmentation method generates synthetic X-ray images for the training of semantic segmentation models combining the X-ray images of nuclear items and X-ray cargo background images. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed data augmentation technique, we trained representative semantic segmentation models and performed extensive experiments to assess its quantitative and qualitative performance capabilities. Our findings show that multiple item insertions to respond to actual X-ray cargo inspection situations and the resulting occlusion expressions significantly affect the performance of the segmentation models. We believe that this augmentation research will enhance automatic cargo inspections to prevent the illegal transfer of nuclear items at airports and ports.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7537
JournalSensors
Volume23
Issue number17
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2023

Keywords

  • cargo inspection
  • data augmentation
  • deep neural networks
  • nuclear items
  • semantic segmentation

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