Friday, November 26, 2010

Not months, but weeks to fix the scanners

Atlantic Monthly's Alexis Madrigal says experts cannot generate automatic threat detection software for airport screeners.

But they do detect anomalies, and these anomalies can be slightly distorted for the TSA screener to view. Not only that, the possibility of image warping in general has been proposed without limiting the ability of humans to detect anomalies.

The Dutch use the L3 which attempts to identify explosives:
If the software identifies a passenger carrying explosives, an outline of the problem body area is displayed on a generic mannequin figure instead of on the actual image of the passenger's body. The mannequin image, which appears on the operator's control panel, "can then be used by security personnel to direct a focused discussion or search," the company website reads.

But, even with a high false positive rate, the system should be at least better tha the full nudy scans.  So, OK maybe a month, but certainly not months.

Alexis also reviews the image distortion method
Technologically, image processing to distort a body's form is trivial. You take the image that comes in from the scanner, pick some reference points on the body, and then elongate, resize, and stretch the image. The images come out looking less human very quickly -- and that's precisely the point. .

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