A novel material detection algorithm based on 2D GMM-based power density function and image detail addition scheme in dual energy X-ray images

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Pourghassem, Hossein

Affiliations: Department of Electrical Engineering, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Isfahan, Iran. Tel.: +98 0331 2291111; Fax: +98 0331 2291017; E-mail: h_pourghasem@iaun.ac.ir

Abstract: Material detection is a vital need in dual energy X-ray luggage inspection systems at security of airport and strategic places. In this paper, a novel material detection algorithm based on statistical trainable models using 2-Dimensional power density function (PDF) of three material categories in dual energy X-ray images is proposed. In this algorithm, the PDF of each material category as a statistical model is estimated from transmission measurement values of low and high energy X-ray images by Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). Material label of each pixel of object is determined based on dependency probability of its transmission measurement values in the low and high energy to PDF of three material categories (metallic, organic and mixed materials). The performance of material detection algorithm is improved by a maximum voting scheme in a neighborhood of image as a post-processing stage. Using two background removing and denoising stages, high and low energy X-ray images are enhanced as a pre-processing procedure. For improving the discrimination capability of the proposed material detection algorithm, the details of the low and high energy X-ray images are added to constructed color image which includes three colors (orange, blue and green) for representing the organic, metallic and mixed materials. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on real images that had been captured from a commercial dual energy X-ray luggage inspection system. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and operative in detection of the metallic, organic and mixed materials with acceptable accuracy.

Keywords: Material detection, 2D GMM-based power density function, pre-processing, maximum voting scheme, dual energy X-ray image.

DOI: 10.3233/XST-2012-0330

Journal: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 213-228, 2012