Design, development, testing and deployment of theworld's first fully automated individual body armor x-ray inspection system

Abstract With the onset of conflict and great troop deployments into South West Asia in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Radiography Laboratory at the US Army ARDEC was approached to investigate the feasibility of designing an automated inspection system to examine the integrity of all the Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI) ceramic armor plates currently in service. This amounted to on the order of 1 million units so the need for a high-throughput, fully automatedsystem was apparent; this included automated defect recognition (ADR) software and automated material handling (AMH). Among the most challenging imaging artifacts is the fine local variation that arises as a combination of imager noise, photon noise and as a result of the arrangement of the fibers themselves in the plate backing and cover material. In many of these cases, the crack indications are actually smallerthan the level of interference imposed by the fine local variations.