In recent years, baggage screening at airports has included the use of dual-energy X-ray computed tomography (DECT), an advanced technology for nondestructive evaluation. The main challenge remains to reliably find and identify threat objects in the bag from DECT data. This task is particularly hard due to the wide variety of objects, the high clutter, and the presence of metal, which causes streaks and shading in the scanner images. Image noise and artifacts are generally much more severe than in medical CT and can lead to splitting of objects and inaccurate object labeling. The conventional approach performs object segmentation and material identification in two decoupled processes. Dual-energy information is typically not used for the segmentation, and object localization is not explicitly used to stabilize the material parameter estimates. We propose a novel learning-based framework for joint segmentation and identification of objects directly from volumetric DECT images, which is robust to streaks, noise and variability due to clutter. We focus on segmenting and identifying a small set of objects of interest with characteristics that are learned from training images, and consider everything else as background. We include data weighting to mitigate metal artifacts and incorporate an object boundary field to reduce object splitting. The overall formulation is posed as a multilabel discrete optimization problem and solved using an efficient graph-cut algorithm. We test the method on real data and show its potential for producing accurate labels of the objects of interest without splits in the presence of metal and clutter.

We propose a new structure-preserving dual-energy (SPDE) CT inversion technique for luggage screening, which can mitigate metal artifacts and provide precise object localization. Such artifact reduction can increase material identification accuracy in security applications. Our main objective is formation of enhanced photoelectric and Compton pixel property images from dual-energy X-ray tomographic data. We achieve this aim by incorporating three important elements in a single unified framework. First, we generate our images as the solution of a joint optimization problem, which explicitly models the projection process. Second, we include metal aware data weighting to reduce streaks and metal artifacts. Third, we estimate a regularized joint boundary field and apply it to both the photoelectric and Compton images in order to improve object localization as well as smoothing inside the objects. We evaluate the performance of the method using real dual-energy data. We demonstrate a significant reduction in noise and metal artifacts.