Detecting Overlapped Objects in X-Ray Security Imagery by a Label-Aware Mechanism

One of the key challenges to the X-ray security check is to detect the overlapped items in backpacks or suitcases in the X-ray images. Most existing methods improve the robustness of models to the object overlapping problem by enhancing the underlying visual information such as colors and edges. However, this strategy ignores the situations that the objects have similar visual clues as to the background, and objects overlapping each other. Since the two cases rarely appear in existing datasets, we contribute a novel dataset – Cutters and Liquid Containers X-ray Dataset (CLCXray) to complete the related research. Furthermore, we propose a novel Label-aware Mechanism (LA) to tackle the object overlapping problem. Particularly, LA establishes the associations between feature channels and different labels and adjusts the features according to the assigned labels (or pseudo labels) to help improve the prediction results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LA is accurate and robust to detect overlapped objects, and also validate the effectiveness and the good generalization of the LA for arbitrary state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, experimental results show that the network constructed by the LA is superior to the SOTA models on OPIXray and CLCXray, especially solving the challenges of the subset of the highly overlapped objects.