KNN-Based Automatic Cropping for Improved Threat Object Recognition in X-Ray Security Images

One of the most important applications of computer vision algorithms is the detection of threat objects in x-ray security images. However, in the practical setting, this task is complicated by two properties inherent to the dataset, namely, the problem of class imbalance and visual complexity. In our previous work, we resolved the class imbalance problem by using a GAN-based anomaly detection to balance out the bias induced by training a classification model on a non-practical dataset. In this paper, we propose a new method to alleviate the visual complexity problem by using a KNN-based automatic cropping algorithm to remove distracting and irrelevant information from the x-ray images. We use the cropped images as inputs to our current model. Empirical results show substantial improvement to our model, e.g. about 3% in the practical dataset, thus further outperforming previous approaches, which is very critical for security-based applications.