Automated detection and classification of concealed objects using infrared thermography and convolutional neural networks

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the effectiveness of a convolutional neural network (CNN) in classifying infrared images for security scanning. Infrared thermography was explored as a non-invasive security scanner for stand-off and walk-through concealed object detection. Heat generated by human subjects radiates off the clothing surface, allowing detection by an infrared camera. However, infrared lacks in penetration capability compared to longer electromagnetic waves, leading to less obvious visuals on the clothing surface. ResNet-50 was used as the CNN model to automate the classification process of thermal images. The ImageNet database was used to pre-train the model, which was further fine-tuned using infrared images obtained from experiments. Four image pre-processing approaches were explored, i.e., raw infrared image, subject cropped region-of-interest (ROI) image, K-means, and Fuzzy-c clustered images. All these approaches were evaluated using the receiver operating characteristic curve on an internal holdout set, with an area-under-the-curve of 0.8923, 0.9256, 0.9485, and 0.9669 for the raw image, ROI cropped, K-means, and Fuzzy-c models, respectively. The CNN models trained using various image pre-processing approaches suggest that the prediction performance can be improved by the removal of non-decision relevant information and the visual highlighting of features.