Automated target shape detection for vehicle muon tomography

Abstract

Techniques, apparatus and systems for muon tomography vehicle imaging use autonomous processing of 3-dimensional muon tomography vehicle images based on Data Modeling techniques and various applications including analyzing vehicle voxel data such as muon vehicle images to detect potential threat objects and then to further discriminate the identified potential threat objects by shape.

1 . A computer-automated method for processing muon vehicle imaging data of a vehicle under inspection located in a vehicle inspection region within a muon tomography vehicle imaging system, comprising:
 processing muon vehicle imaging data obtained from the vehicle inspection region to obtain a histogram of the muon vehicle imaging data at different positions in the vehicle inspection region;   separating the muon vehicle imaging data into bins based on the histogram;   removing a subset of the muon vehicle imaging data in a mode bin that has higher frequencies of occurrence than remaining muon vehicle imaging data from the muon vehicle imaging data to retain the remaining muon vehicle imaging data for further processing;   using a vehicle assembly recognizer Data Model for identifying vehicle components from the remaining muon vehicle imaging data;   applying the vehicle assembly recognizer Data Model to process the remaining muon vehicle imaging data to produce an image of the vehicle inspection region by removing vehicle components;   using a target identification Data Model for identifying a target object from the remaining muon vehicle imaging data;   applying the target identification Data Model to process data of the image produced after applying the vehicle assembly recognizer Data Model to produce an image of the target object; and   processing the image of the target object to determine a location and a shape of the target object in the vehicle under inspection.