CNN with Pose Segmentation for Suspicious Object Detection in MMW Security Images

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (MMW) imaging scanners can see through clothing to form a three-dimensional holographic image of the human body and suspicious objects, providing a harmless alternative for non-contacting searches in security check. Suspicious object detection in MMW images is challenging, since most of them are small, reflection-weak, shape, and reflection-diverse. Conventional detectors with artificial neural networks, like convolution neural network (CNN), usually take the problem of finding suspicious objects as an object recognition task, yielding difficulties in developing large-amount and complete sample sets of objects. In this paper, a new algorithm is developed using the human pose segmentation followed by the deep CNN detection. The algorithm is emphasized to learn the similarity with humans’ body clutter applied to training corresponding CNNs after the image segmentation base of the pose estimation. Moreover, the suspicious object recognition in the MMW image is converted to a binary classification task. Instead of recognizing all sorts of suspicious objects, the CNN detector determines whether the body part images present the abnormal patterns containing suspicious objects. The proposed algorithm that is based on CNN with the pose segmentation has concise configuration, but optimal performance in the suspicious object detection. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposal.