We present a comparison of 3D feature descriptors with application to threat detection in Computed Tomography (CT) airport baggage imagery. The detectors range in complexity from a basic local density descriptor, through local region histograms and 3D extensions to both to the RIFT descriptor and the seminal SIFT feature descriptor. We show that, in the complex CT imagery domain containing a high degree of noise and imaging artefacts, an object recognition system using simpler descriptors appears to outperform a more complex RIFT/SIFT solution. Recognition rates in excess of 95% are demonstrated with minimal false positive rates for a set of exemplar 3D objects.

We present a survey of techniques for the reduction of streaking artefacts caused by metallic objects in X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) images. A comprehensive review of the existing state-of-the-art Metal Artefact Reduction (MAR) techniques, drawn predominantly from the medical CT literature, is supported by an experimental comparison of twelve MAR techniques. The experimentation is grounded in an evaluation based on a standard scientific comparison protocol for MAR methods, using a software generated medical phantom image as well as a clinical CT scan. The experimentation is extended by considering novel applications of CT imagery consisting of metal objects in non-tissue surroundings acquired from the aviation security screening domain. We address the shortage of thorough performance analyses in the existing MAR literature by conducting a qualitative as well as quantitative comparative evaluation of the selected techniques. We find that the difficulty in generating accurate priors to be the predominant factor limiting the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art medical MAR techniques when applied to non-medical CT imagery. This study thus extends previous works by: comparing several state-of-the-art MAR techniques; considering both medical and non-medical applications and performing a thorough performance analysis, considering both image quality as well as computational demands.

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We introduce a novel 3D extension to the hierarchical visual cortex model used for prior work in 2D object recognition. Prior work on the use of the visual cortex standard model for the explicit task of object class recognition has solely concentrated on 2D imagery. In this paper we discuss the explicit 3D extension of each layer in this visual cortex model hierarchy for use in object recognition in 3D volumetric imagery. We apply this extended methodology to the automatic detection of a class of threat items in Computed Tomography (CT) security baggage imagery. The CT imagery suffers from poor resolution and a large number of artefacts generated through the presence of metallic objects. In our examination of recognition performance we make a comparison to a codebook approach derived from a 3D SIFT descriptor and demonstrate that the visual cortex method out-performs in this imagery. Recognition rates in excess of 95% with minimal false positive rates are demonstrated in the detection of a range of threat items.

This paper presents an extension to a recent intensity-limiting sinogram completion-based Metal Artefact Reduction (MAR) algorithm for Computed Tomography (CT) images containing multiple metal objects. A novel weighting scheme is introduced, whereby the intensities of the MAR-corrected pixels are modified based on their spatial locations relative to the metal objects. Pixels falling within the straight-line regions connecting multiple metal objects are subjected to less intensive intensity-limiting, thereby compensating for the characteristic dark bands occurring in these regions. Extensive experimentation is performed on a state-of-the-art numerical simulation, a clinical CT data set and a baggage security CT data set. Comprehensive performance analysis, using reference and reference-free error metrics, Bland-Altman plots and visual comparisons, demonstrate an improvement in the restoration of the underestimated intensities occurring in the regions connecting multiple metal objects.