Abstract
X-ray security screening is a well-established technology used in public spaces. The traditional method for detecting prohibited items in X-ray images relies on manual inspection, necessitating security personnel with extensive experience and focused attention to achieve satisfactory detection accuracy. However, the high-intensity and long-duration nature of the work leads to security personnel fatigue, which in turn reduces the accuracy of prohibited items detection and results in false alarms or missed detections. In response to the challenges posed by the coexistence of multiple prohibited items, incomplete identification information due to overlapping items, variable distribution positions in typical scenarios, and the need for portable detection equipment, this study proposes a lightweight automatic detection method for prohibited items. Based on establishment the sample database for prohibited items, a new backbone network with a residual structure and attention mechanism is introduced to form a deep learning algorithm. Additionally, a dilated convolutional spatial pyramid module and a depthwise separable convolution algorithm are added to fuse multi-scale features, to improve the accuracy of prohibited items detection. This study developed a lightweight automatic detection method for prohibited items, and its highest detection rate is 95.59%, which demonstrates a 1.86% mAP improvement over the YOLOv4-tiny baseline with 122 FPS. The study achieved high accurate detection of typical prohibited items, providing support for the assurance of public safety.