Unsupervised anomaly instance segmentation for baggage threat recognition

Identifying potential threats concealed within the baggage is of prime concern for the security staff. Many researchers have developed frameworks that can automatically detect baggage threats from security X-ray scans. However, to the best of our knowledge, all of these frameworks require extensive training efforts on large-scale and well-annotated datasets, which are hard to procure in the real world, especially for the rarely seen contraband items. This paper presents a novel unsupervised anomaly instance segmentation framework that recognizes baggage threats, in X-ray scans, as anomalies without requiring any ground truth labels. Furthermore, thanks to its stylization capacity, the framework is trained only once, and at the inference stage, it detects and extracts contraband items regardless of their scanner specifications. Our one-staged approach initially learns to reconstruct normal baggage content via an encoder–decoder network utilizing a proposed stylization loss function. The model subsequently identifies the abnormal regions by analyzing the disparities within the original and the reconstructed scans. The anomalous regions are then clustered and post-processed to fit a bounding box for their localization. In addition, an optional classifier can also be appended with the proposed framework to recognize the categories of these extracted anomalies. A thorough evaluation of the proposed system on four public baggage X-ray datasets, without any re-training, demonstrates that it achieves competitive performance as compared to the conventional fully supervised methods (i.e., the mean average precision score of 0.7941 on SIXray, 0.8591 on GDXray, 0.7483 on OPIXray, and 0.5439 on COMPASS-XP dataset) while outperforming state-of-the-art semi-supervised and unsupervised baggage threat detection frameworks by 67.37%, 32.32%, 47.19%, and 45.81% in terms of F1 score across SIXray, GDXray, OPIXray, and COMPASS-XP datasets, respectively.