sensors

Article
Multi-Object Detection in Security Screening Scene Based on
Convolutional Neural Network
Fan Sun, Xiangfeng Zhang, Yunzhong Liu and Hong Jiang *

College of Intelligent Manufacturing and Industrial Modernization, Xinjiang University, Urumchi 830017, China
* Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract: The technique for target detection based on a convolutional neural network has been
widely implemented in the industry. However, the detection accuracy of X-ray images in security
screening scenarios still requires improvement. This paper proposes a coupled multi-scale feature
extraction and multi-scale attention architecture. We integrate this architecture into the Single Shot
MultiBox Detector (SSD) algorithm and find that it can significantly improve the effectiveness of
target detection. Firstly, ResNet is used as the backbone network to replace the original VGG network
to improve the feature extraction capability of the convolutional neural network for images. Secondly,
a multi-scale feature extraction (MSE) structure is designed to enrich the information contained in the
multi-stage prediction feature layer. Finally, the multi-scale attention architecture (MSA) is fused onto
the prediction feature layer to eliminate the redundant features’ interference and extract effective
contextual information. In addition, a combination of Adaptive-NMS and Soft-NMS is used to output
the final prediction anchor boxes when performing non-maximum suppression. The results of the
experiments show that the improved method improves the mean average precision (mAP) value by
7.4% compared to the original approach. New modules make detection much more accurate while
keeping the detection speed the same.

Keywords: security screening scenes; convolutional neural networks; multi-scale feature extraction;
Citation: Sun, F.; Zhang, X.; Liu, Y.;
Jiang, H. Multi-Object Detection in
attentional mechanisms
Security Screening Scene Based on
Convolutional Neural Network.
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836. https://
doi.org/10.3390/s22207836
1. Introduction
X-ray security screening is now widely used in the subway, airports, train stations,
Academic Editors: Rongxing Lu and
campuses, superstores, and other scenarios. At the same time, with the continuous de-
Wei Yi
velopment of artificial intelligence technology, intelligent security solutions are gradually
Received: 30 August 2022 gaining widespread attention in the industrial sector. However, at the moment, contraband
Accepted: 13 October 2022 detection under the X-ray security machine relies primarily on manual discrimination.
Published: 15 October 2022 While the X-ray image background is complicated, many targets, low color contrast, and
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral occlusion phenomenon are more serious [1], and the security personnel needs to spend a
with regard to jurisdictional claims in long time on the detection process.
published maps and institutional affil- Alex et al., introduced the AlexNet [2] model, which employs deep convolutional
iations. neural networks to solve image classification problems and is significantly more effective
than conventional image processing algorithms, demonstrating the superior performance
of deep neural networks in the field of computer vision. Since then, the application of
deep convolutional neural networks to image recognition, image segmentation, and target
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. detection problems has become an essential topic of study. Currently, target detectors are
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. categorized into one-stage target detectors and multi-stage target detectors based on the
This article is an open access article configuration of their networks.
distributed under the terms and
Girshick [3] et al., initially presented the R-CNN network model to extract features
conditions of the Creative Commons
using convolutional neural networks as an alternative to classic target detection approaches
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
using artificially created feature extraction and description approaches. After that, convo-
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
lutional neural network technology experienced rapid growth. With the development of
4.0/).

Sensors 2022, 22, 7836. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22207836 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors

Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 2 of 22

artificial intelligence, a significant number of outstanding target detection algorithms have

appeared, all of which employ convolutional neural networks to handle target detection
challenges. Girshick [4] et al., introduced the Fast-RCNN network architecture to perform
convolution on the whole image, ROI Polling to generate fixed-size feature maps, and
Softmax instead of SVM classifier to increase target detection network speed and accuracy.
Ren [5] et al., proposed Faster-RCNN to produce region recommendations via RPN. The
RPN framework improves the network’s speed of detection. Even though the multi-stage
detector can achieve high detection accuracy, its detection speed is exceedingly slow.
Redmon [6] et al., proposed the YOLO object detection framework, a neural network
framework appropriate for targets detected in real-time and with a detection speed of
45 FPS for the first time. Later versions of YOLO, YOLO 9000, YOLO v3, YOLOv4, and
YOLOv7 [7–10] included new neural network architectures such as batch normalization [11],
FPN [12], and SPP [13] to strike a balance between detection accuracy and speed. To build
a genuinely anchorless detector, Tian [14] et al., suggested Fully Convolutional One-Stage
Object Detection (FCOS) based on the RetinaNet [15] network architecture. The Single
Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) was proposed by Liu [16] et al., as an anchor-frame-based
single-stage target detector that obtains the first mAP value of a single-stage target detector
above a multi-stage detector. One-stage detection may reach a relatively high speed and can
frequently achieve acceptable accuracy on a large scale. The problem is that it is difficult to
achieve good detection accuracy for small objects, particularly when there are targets of
varying scales in the same image.
Through the literature [17], we can compare the detection speeds of current main-
stream target detectors. Single-stage target detectors can infer 24–105 times faster than
multi-stage target detectors. The fastest single-stage target detectors detect speeds can
up to 200 FPS, while the fastest multi-stage target detectors only reach 5 FPS. Because
the object detection algorithm in this paper needs to be applicable to HIKVISION's ISD-
SC5030SA-1C type X-ray security screening equipment, the following conditions need
to be considered. The screening machine is suitable for daily scenarios of baggage and
parcel security inspection and uses a line-by-line scanning method for imaging. In order
to ensure that the imaging results are clear and stable, the maximum transmission speed
of the screening machine is specified as 0.2 m/s. In order to ensure the efficiency of the
inspection, it is necessary to have a passing rate of at least 720 items/h. The maximum size
of the screening machine allowed through is 500 mm × 300 mm (width and height). The
maximum length of the package allowed to be detected is 980 mm. Taking into account the
above conditions, X-ray security screening requires at least 10 FPS detection speed to meet
the detection requirements, making it challenging for multi-stage target detectors to meet
real-time detection requirements. The original SSD algorithm used in this paper can reach
a minimum detection speed of 19 FPS, which meets all the requirements, and the improved
SSD algorithm can reach an average detection speed of 22 FPS.
For X-ray image target detection, Qiao [18] et al., employed pyramidal convolution
to improve multi-scale feature extraction for X-ray image target recognition and intro-
duced band pooling to use image contextual information to improve detection accuracy.
Zhang [19] et al., used the DenesNet [20] network for feature fusion to improve network
feature extraction and characterization. Combining multi-scale contextual information,
Wu [21] et al., applied dilation convolution to enhance detection accuracy. Akacy [22]
et al., employed regional full convolutional neural networks to identify X-ray image targets.
Galvez [23] et al., used a transfer learning approach to address the X-ray image classifi-
cation problem, which significantly increased classification accuracy. The above works
focus on improving neural networks’ ability to extract and characterize image features.
However, they do not consider that a lot of redundant background information is extracted
when extracting features. Redundant background information can make it harder for target
classification and boundary regression networks to find objects.
The literature [24] uses transfer learning to detect small-size targets in X-ray images
using the Faster-RCNN-based fusion feature pyramid network (FPN) for multi-scale feature
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 3 of 22

adaption and localization of small-size targets utilizing a small anchor point strategy and
ROI pooling method. Literature [25] suggested a cascaded structure tensor technique for
acquiring contour-based suggestions, removing clutter and occlusion from X-ray images,
and then passing the candidate proposals to a single feed-forward convolutional neural
network for recognition. In the literature [26], in order to address the occlusion problem in
X-ray image detection, a de-obscuring attention module (DOAM) and diverse materials
exhibiting visually distinct colors and textures are utilized to build an attention tensor and
enhance the detector’s feature map information. Literature [27] suggests a lateral inhibition
module (LIM) that maximally inhibits the flow of noisy information via a bidirectional
propagation (BP) module and activates the most attractive borders from four directions via
a boundary activation (BA) module. Literature [28] employs adversarial domain adaption
approaches to match the background distribution of a large number of unlabeled SoC
samples. This approach helps to train the network to detect items in the SoC dataset using
a small labeled dataset. The previous work focused on solving the problems of dense
stacking and mutual occlusion of X-ray images or making a better dataset of X-ray images.
However, they do not consider the limitations of existing fixed-size convolution kernels to
handle widely available objects with different scales.
In recent years, NVIDIA has continued to launch higher-performance GPU products,
and the problem of arithmetic power limiting the development of deep learning has also
been alleviated to some extent. In industrial scenarios, SSD has been able to meet real-
time requirements, while compared to the YOLO series of continuous updates, up to
YOLOv7, SSD algorithm updates and optimization have been relatively limited. However,
considering background feature redundancy has a substantial effect on model detection
performance, and the feature pyramid structure has been demonstrated to play a crucial
role in multi-scale and small object detection in target detection tasks. The SSD architecture
prediction feature layer essentially acts as a divide-and-conquer for different scales [29].
Hence, the focus of this article is on SSD-based architectures, which comprise:
(1) Replacing the VGG [30] architecture in the original literature with the ResNet [31]
architecture to enhance the backbone network model extraction and characterization
capabilities.
(2) Based on the divide-and-conquer concept, we create a multi-scale extraction module
to enrich the information inside the multi-stage prediction feature layer.
(3) On the feature prediction layer, a multi-scale attention mechanism is combined to get
rid of redundant feature interference and pull out useful context information.
The other parts of this paper are arranged as follows: Section 2 introduces the basic idea
and network structure of the classical algorithm SSD; Section 3 illustrates the improvement
strategy of improved SSD in detail; Section 4 presents the experimental environment,
dataset distribution, experimental result analysis, ablation experiment, and algorithm
comparison. Finally, Section 5 provides the conclusions, and Section 6 introduces follow-up
work and improvement direction.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Original Network Architecture
SSD is the first one-stage anchor-based target detection method that outperforms
multi-stage target detection in terms of precision and inference time. Firstly, using the VGG
network to extract image features and additional layers, the multi-scale feature prediction
layers are added to predict results, and non-maximum suppression is used to generate the
final detectable results. The core idea is mainly to predefine multi-scale anchor boxes on
the prediction feature layer, later to obtain the detected target’s location by regressing the
anchor boxes, and at the same time, to classify the class of the corresponding target. The
specific steps include the following.
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 4 of 22

2.1.1. Backbone Network

Numerous experiments have shown that the depth of a convolutional neural network
significantly impacts the performance of tasks such as image classification, target detection,
image segmentation, and so on. As the network’s depth rises, the model can extract
richer semantic information and perform better in practical tasks. The VGG network
investigates the effect of neural network depth on model performance for the first time
using a 3 × 3 small receptive field convolutional filter. While MaxPooling layers 5 provide
spatial pooling with step size 2 and window size 2 × 2, the linear transformation of the
input channels is achieved by 1 × 1 convolution layer, replacing the fully connected layers.
Figure 1 depicts the architecture of the VGG network. The VGG network outperforms the
neural network with higher breadth but fewer layers for the same number of parameters.
As a result, the original SSD method used the VGG architecture as the backbone network.

Figure 1. VGG—16 network architecture diagram.

The SSD approach employs the VGG-16 network architecture as the backbone network.
Still, it retains only the first 15 convolution layers of its feature extraction part while
adjusting the final MaxPooling5 downsampling from the original network with a step size
of 2 and a window size of 2 × 2 to a step size of 1 and a window size of 3 × 3. Following
the adjustment, the size of Conv4 and Conv5 feature maps will remain unchanged. Finally,
the VGG-16 model’s fully connected layers FC6 and FC7 are replaced by 3 × 3 convolution
layers (Conv6) and 1 × 1 convolution layers (Conv7). The Conv4_3 convolution layer serves
as the first feature prediction layer, and Conv6_2 serves as the second feature prediction
layer. Figure 2 depicts the architecture of the SSD backbone network.

Figure 2. SSD approach backbone network.

Four extra feature prediction layers are introduced as additional layers in the SSD
approach to adapt to detecting targets of varied scales. The subsequent layer employs one
1 × 1 convolution layer to reduce the channel dimension, then adds one 3 × 3 convolution
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 5 of 22

layer to refine semantic contexts. All convolutional operations are followed by batch
normalization and ReLU activation functions. The additional feature prediction layers
have 256-dimensional output channels, except for Conv8_2, which has 512-dimensional
output channels. The feature map sizes of the various feature prediction layers are 10 × 10,
5 × 5, 3 × 3, 1 × 1, respectively. Four 3 × 3 convolution layers make up the classification
and regression networks of the feature prediction layers Conv7 to Conv9, and four 1 × 1
convolution layers make up Conv10. The classification and regression networks then
receive data from the feature extraction layer. For all prediction categories, the number of
output channels of the classification network equals the number of predefined anchors at
feature map cells on the feature map. The number of output channels for all regression
networks is simply the number of four offsets of predetermined anchor frames at each
feature map cell.

2.1.2. Predefined Anchors and Positive and Negative Sample Matching

When predefining anchor boxes for multiple feature mapping at the network’s top, a
set of bounding boxes is associated with each feature mapping cell. As the feature map’s
pixel points are tiled, the position of each default anchor box relative to its related cell is
fixed. Using default box shapes with varying aspect ratios and sizes in the same feature
mapping layer can also efficiently match the spatial distribution of possible output box
shapes. The default anchor box sizes in different feature layers vary to allow the detection
of targets of varying scales. SSD sets the hyperparameters of aspect ratio to ar = {1, 2, 3, 1/2,
1/3} respectively when predefining anchor boxes, and finally uses Equation (1) to design
the sizes of different anchor boxes as follows.
Smax − Smin
Sk = (k − 1) + Smin , k ∈ [1, m] (1)
m−1
In the formula, assume that the prediction feature layer used to generate the default
box is m and that 0.2 and 0.9 represent the scales of the default anchor box in the lowest
feature prediction layer and the highest feature prediction layer, respectively. In contrast,
take the arithmetic progression approach and expand the default anchor box size for the
other predicted feature layers. The following expression sets the width of the default anchor
√
box for the current feature map: wa k = Sr ar . The height calculation formula is as follows:
√
wa k = Sr / ar , and an additional set of anchor boxes with an aspect ratio of 1 with a scale
0.5 j+0.5
of Sk 0 = Sk SK + 1 , and the center point of the anchor box is ( i+
p
| fk |
, | f | ) where | f k | is the
k
size of the k-th feature map layer. The definition of the default anchor box is still an open
problem, and other clustering algorithms such as K-means also generate predefined anchor
boxes for different tasks. The final distribution of predefined anchor frames and aspect
ratios used in the SSD algorithm is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Predefined anchors and aspect ratios.

Feature Map Size Anchor Boxes Size Aspect Ratios

38 × 38 21, 45 1, 2, 0.5
19 × 19 45, 99 1, 2, 0.5, 3, 1/3
10 × 10 99, 153 1, 2, 0.5, 3, 1/3
5×5 153, 207 1, 2, 0.5, 3, 1/3
3×3 207, 261 1, 2, 0.5, 3, 1/3
1×1 261, 315 1, 2, 0.5, 3, 1/3

Literature [32] suggests that positive and negative sample matching, one of the key
factors causing the performance gap between various target detection network models, and
the severe imbalance between positive and negative samples, can significantly hinder the
model’s final performance. The SSD model matches positive samples based on the existing
anchor boxes and mostly follows the two rules below.
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 6 of 22

(1) Calculate the intersection over union between the ground truth boxes and the default
anchor boxes. For each ground truth box, choose the intersection over union with the
highest value as the positive sample.
(2) Mark the remaining default anchors not marked as positive samples if their intersec-
tion over union is greater than 0.5 with any ground truth box.
Based on the aforementioned matching principle, numerous predetermined anchor
boxes can be allocated to each ground truth box, thereby facilitating the selection of the
anchor box with the greatest score for regression in the prediction stage. Algorithm 1
shows the algorithm flow detail. The remaining anchor boxes are designated as negative
samples. Typically, the number of negative examples is significantly more than the number
of positive samples. The difference between the number of positive and negative samples
is a major factor that hurts network performance during learning. It can cause a significant
drop in how well the network can detect targets. Therefore, the SSD algorithm only selects
the default anchor box that incorrectly predicts negative samples as positive samples with
the highest scores in a ratio of 1:3 of positive to negative samples to calculate the loss in the
classification network. All other default anchor frames are discarded. Other default anchors
are not taken into account, and negative samples are not used to figure out regression loss.

Algorithm 1 Positive and negative sample matching

Input:
g: Real sample box, mainly including the coordinate information of the upper left and lower
right corners
l: True sample label
d: default anchor box, mainly including the upper left and lower right coordinates
Iw : the width of the image, the image width and height are equal in size
Output:
Ol : the positive sample label matched by the default box
Od : the default anchor box as the positive sample
1. Real sample frame normalization: g = g/Iw
2. Default anchor box normalization.
For each feature map do:
d = d/Iw
3. Calculate the intersection over union of any two anchor frames:
iou = IOU (g, d)
4. Get the default box matched by the real sample box and its index (first dimension):
best1_iou, index1 = max(iou(1))
5. get the real box matched by the default anchor box and its index (second dimension):
best2_iou, index2 = max(iou(2))
6. set index1 index to the default box intersection over union to 1.0:
best2_iou[index1] = 1.0
7. Modify index2 index to the real sample box index.
idx = arange(0, index2.size)
index2[index1[idx]] = idx
8. get the mask of the remaining default anchor boxes larger than the threshold:
mask = best2_iou>0.5
9. index of all default box positive samples:
index2 = index2[mask]
10. set the default anchor box label.
Ol [8732] = 0
Ol [index2] = l[index2]
11. Positive sample anchors:
Od = d[index2]
Return Ol , Od
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 7 of 22

2.1.3. Loss Function

The overall loss function is the average of the localization loss and the confidence loss.
The default value of a in Equation (2) is 1. xij p = {1, 0} is an indicator function, indicating
that the i-th default box matches the j-th real sample box, and p indicates that the default box
belongs to a category. A default box can only correspond to a ground truth box, whereas
a ground truth box may contain numerous default anchor boxes. The localization loss is
expressed using the smoothl1 function. The advantage of the smoothl1 function is that when
the input is small, the loss gradient decreases, and the network converges to the correct
parameters. In contrast, when the input is large, the absolute value of the loss function
reaches the upper limit of 1, which is not so large as to destroy the network parameters
and cause unstable training. Simultaneously, the centroid position parameters and the
width and height of the actual sample frame are normalized to enable neural network
learning. Equations (2)–(4) show, in order, the general loss function of the SSD method, the
localization loss function, and the confidence loss function.

1
L( x, c, l, g) = (L ( x, c) + αLloc ( x, l, g)) (2)
N con f
N
Ll oc ( x, l, g) = ∑ ∑ xi j k smoooth L1 (li m − ĝm
j )
i ∈ pos m∈{cx,cy,w,h}
g cx − d cx
ĝ j cx = j dw i
i
g cy − d cy (3)
ĝ j cy = j d h i
i w
g
ĝ j w = log( d j w )
i
gh
ĝ j h = log( d j h )
i

N
exp(ci p )
Lcon f ( x, c) = − ∑ xij p log(ĉi p ) − ∑ log(ĉi 0 )where ĉi p =
∑ p exp(ci p )
(4)
i ∈ Pos i ∈ Neg

3. Improved Approach
3.1. Improved Backbone
The literature [33] indicates that the overall depth of the model is very important for
performance. Shallow neural networks focus more on the image’s edge contour and color
information. As the network layers deepen, the neural network will focus more on texture
information. As the network continues to deepen, the layers will focus on information with
class specificity, object pose, and general object class information. The shallower neural
network layers often contain more precise location information, whereas the deeper neural
network levels contain semantic information regarding the target. Therefore, adding deeper
backbone networks can greatly improve target detection accuracy. Compared to VGG-
16 as the backbone network, ResNet-50 achieves a deeper convolutional neural network
by reducing the number of parameters by 82.97 percent while avoiding the problem of
performance degradation in the deep model via the residual connection module. Figure 3
depicts the basic module of ResNet. The 3 × 3 convolution step of Conv4_1 is changed to 1,
and the 1 × 1 convolution step of residual connection is changed to 1. Consequently, the
size of the Conv4 feature map is the same as that of Conv3, and five more feature prediction
modules comprised of 1 × 1 convolution layer and 3 × 3 convolution layer are added.
The output of all convolution layers is batch normalized and nonlinearly activated by the
ReLU function while the step size of all 1 × 1 convolution layers is set to 1, the step size of
all 3 × 3 convolution layers is {2,2,2,1,1}, the number of filled pixels is {1,1,1,0,0}, and the
output channel dimension is {512,512,256,256,256}. Table 2 displays the complete backbone
network parameters.
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 8 of 22

Figure 3. Residual block.

Table 2. Backbone network parameters.

Layer Name Output Size VGG ResNet

Conv1 150 × 150 [Conv3] × 2 [Conv7] × 1
Conv2 75 × 75 [Conv3] × 2 [Conv1, Conv3, Conv1] × 3
[Conv3] × 2
Conv3 38 × 38 [Conv1, Conv3, Conv1] × 4
[Conv1] × 1
Conv4 38 × 38 [Conv3] × 2 [Conv1, Conv3, Conv1] × 6
Additional layer1 19 × 19 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1
Additional layer2 10 × 10 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1
Additional layer3 5×5 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1
Additional layer4 3×3 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1
Additional layer5 1×1 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1 [Conv1, Conv3] × 1

3.2. Multi-Scale Feature Extraction

Literature [29] indicates that the ability of the feature pyramid model to divide-and-
conquer at different scales plays the most significant role. In contrast, feature fusion of the
model and contextual semantic information fusion is not essential factors in improving
detection accuracy. On the basis of this concept, a multi-scale feature extraction structure has
been developed to increase the information regarding the multiple scales of detection target
features contained in the prediction feature layer. Due to the fixed size of the convolutional
receptive field, it can cover different object sizes by stacking dilation convolution with
varying sizes of steps. Additionally, a residual connection is used for feature fusion to
ensure that the features extracted from the small receptive field are not lost when employing
the dilation convolution with a larger receptive field. The completed structure for multi-
scale feature extraction is depicted in Figure 4.
The literature [13] proposes a spatial pyramid pooling mechanism that can generate
feature representations of a fixed length, making the neural network adaptable to different-
sized images. Concurrently, due to the use of multi-level pooling, the model becomes
more robust against object deformation, which improves the detection accuracy of the
model based on the aggregation of variable scale features. Therefore, when designing
the multi-scale feature extraction, we rely initially on the processing of feature pyramids,
employing 1 × 1 convolution layers to reduce the channel dimensionality and then 3 × 3
convolution to refine the semantic contextual information. To achieve the same effect of
fusing features of different scales as spatial pyramid pooling, the main branch of multi-scale
feature extraction is 3-way. The features with different scale receptive fields are generated
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 9 of 22

by stacking two sets of 3 × 3 expanding convolutions with expansion rates of {1,2,3,4}

and {2,4,6,8}, respectively. In contrast, the original features are stitched to the feature layer
after multi-scale feature extraction using residual connections to achieve the same effect as
spatial pyramid pooling. Finally, in the feature extraction using expanded convolution, use
1 × 1 convolution to restore the number of channels. Use identity to make the remaining
blocks for feature fusion so that features collected by the shallow network do not get lost
when extracting large receptive field features.

Figure 4. Multi-scale feature extraction module.

3.3. Multi-Scale Attention Mechanism

Attention techniques such as SENet [34], CBAM [35], SPANet [36], SKNet [37], and
EPSANet [38] have been demonstrated to significantly improve the resolution of difficulties
in image processing, natural language processing, etc. The primary characteristic of the
attention mechanism is its capacity to favor the most informative feature representation in
the assignment to prevent uniform feature representation and to employ global information
to emphasize valuable characteristics while suppressing less useful ones selectively. On the
one hand, the existing attention mechanism can recalibrate the channel response, spatial
response, or both. On the other hand, the attention mechanism is able to adjust the size
of the receptive field adaptively. This concept is mainly inspired by the phenomenon of
adaptive modulation of receptive field size following visual cortical neuron activation.
Furthermore, good model interaction in both the channel and spatial dimensions can often
improve model performance while making the model less complicated and enhancing
model generalizability.
By extracting multi-scale features, the network model can gather a lot of information
about multi-scale features. However, not all of the features increase the model’s detection
accuracy. Since X-ray images frequently have complex backgrounds and occlusion stacking
between objects, as depicted in Figure 5, the multi-scale feature extraction module contains
many redundant background features. A large number of redundant background features
and features extracted after the occluded objects will result in severe category imbalance,
which is not conducive to improving the accuracy and generalizability. Therefore, it
is necessary to design a multi-scale attention mechanism, added after the multi-scale
feature extraction module, to improve the information that is beneficial to the accuracy and
generalizability. Because both spatial and channel-based attention mechanisms can improve
the model’s detection accuracy, the feature layer following the multi-scale feature extraction
module contains perceptual receptive field information at each scale. It is necessary to
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 10 of 22

design a multi-scale attention mechanism that interacts with adjacent channels and spaces’
feature information. In addition, when constructing the attention mechanism, we should
consider the size of the number of parameters since an excessive number of attention
modules can slow down the model’s inference speed when integrated into the framework
for target detection. Since the multi-scale attention mechanism is applied to the feature
prediction layer, the feature map size in the last two layers of the feature prediction layer,
i.e., additional layers 4 and 5, is downsampled to 3 × 3 and 1 × 1, respectively. The
feature map no longer has accurate location information, so only the squeeze-excitation
(SE) module is used to interact with the channel information in these two layers.

Figure 5. (Left) Normal scene. (Right) X-ray scene.

In the implementation, a multi-scale self-attention module is designed, primarily

consisting of the spatial self-attention module and the channel self-attention module. The
overall local interaction of channel and spatial feature information is attained by processing
the input tensor of multiple scales in parallel. Referring to the CBAM design strategy,
the channel attention module is similarly positioned ahead of the spatial self-attention
module. Figure 6a,b depict the detailed modules. In order to avoid increasing an excessive
number of parameters, the multi-scale attention mechanism is constructed using grouped
convolution [39] to segregate the feature information at various scales. Compared to
the standard convolutional parameter number, the grouped convolution parameter and
computation number (Equations (5) and (6)) decrease g times. g is the number of groups, k
is the size of the convolution kernel, Cin is the number of input channels, and Cout is the
number of output channels. hout represents the height of the output feature map, whereas
Wout represents its width.
Cin × k × k × Cout
Cin Cout (5)
g ×k×k× g ×g

(Cin × 2 × k × k) × Hout × Wout × Cout

(6)
( Cgin × 2 × k × k) × Hout × Wout × Cout
g ×g

The size of the previous feature prediction layer Xi −1 is adjusted to the following scale
of feature prediction layer Xi using a set of 1 × 1 convolution and 3 × 3 convolution. That
would make the attention mechanism adapt to the sizes of different feature prediction
layers, after which a multi-scale convolution kernel partitions the input feature Xi into
parts of S, i.e., [Xi0 , Xi1 , . . . , Xis −1 ]. Grouped convolution would handle input features
with different convolution kernel scales without increasing the computational effort. The
relationship between the number of groups and the size of the convolution kernel scale
follows the design Equation (7) of the literature [39], where G represents the number of
groups and k is the convolution kernel size. The final adopted convolution kernel sizes
are [3, 5, 7, 9], respectively. The number of groups corresponding to them is [1, 4, 8, 16],
and the convolution process is shown in Equation (8), where ki represents the i-th group
convolution kernel size. Xi represents the current feature prediction that covers the same
receptive field. The process of channel interaction is shown in Equation (9), where C0 and C1
represent two 1 × 1 convolution layers, and σ represents the sigmoid nonlinear activation
function. H and W represent the feature map’s width and height, respectively. Lastly, the
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 11 of 22

global information after the cross-channel interaction of multiple convolutional kernels

is added to the size of the input dimension and then put through a Softmax operation to
adjust the attention vector at the channel level and get the multi-scale channel rescaling
weights. This is shown in Equation (10), where Gi is the attention weight of each channel.
k −1
G=2 2 (7)

Fi = Conv(k i , Xi ), i = 0, 1, 2, . . . S − 1 (8)
H W
1
H×W∑ ∑ Fi (u, v)))))
Gi = σ (C1 (σ (C0 ( (9)
u v

G = Cat([ G0 , G1 , G2 , . . . , Gs−1 ])
exp( Gi )
atti = Softmax( Gi ) = s−1 (10)
∑ exp( Gi )
i =0

Figure 6. (a) Multi-scale attention mechanism (channel). (b) Multi-scale attention mechanism (space).
 Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 12 of 22

After recalibration of the channel-level attention vector, the output tensor generates
a spatial attention map utilizing the spatial relationship between features. The spatial
attention information is obtained by stitching all channels’ mean and maximum values of
the corresponding feature layers. The information regions can be effectively highlighted by
applying pooling operations along the channel axes [22] states. Following this, the spatial
attention of each scale is fused with the MaxPooling and average pooling information using
7 × 7 window size, with the fill value set to 3 and the stride set to 1 to maintain the size of
the feature map. A spatial attention output tensor is generated for each scale of the feature
map, as depicted in Equation (12). The spatial attention information is then recalibrated
using a sigmoid operation, as illustrated by Equation (13). Experiments show that using a
multi-scale attention method can increase the model’s detection mAP value by about 2.1%
on the dataset.

Fi = Cat( AvgPool ( Gi ), MaxPool ( Gi )), s = 0, 1, . . . , s − 1 (11)

Ft = Conv7 ( Ft , Ft+1 ), t = 0, 1, 2, . . . , s − 2 (12)

1
F = Sigmoid( Ft ) = (13)
1 + e− Ft
The final improved target detection framework is shown in Figure 7.

2022, 22, x FOR PEER REVIEW 14 of 24

(a)

(b)
Figure 7. (a) Improved
Figure target detection framework.
7. (a) Improved (b) Objective
target detection framework.classification network
(b) Objective with network with regres-
classification
regression network (prediction head).
sion network (prediction head).

4. Experiment
4.1. Experimental Environment and Hyperparameter Setting
All experiments with this technique were conducted using an Nvidia RTX3070 (12 G
graphics memory) graphics card with a Windows 10 operating system, 32 G.B. of RAM,
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 13 of 22

4. Experiment
4.1. Experimental Environment and Hyperparameter Setting
All experiments with this technique were conducted using an Nvidia RTX3070 (12 G
graphics memory) graphics card with a Windows 10 operating system, 32 G.B. of RAM,
the CUDA11.6 accelerated computing library, and the Pytorch framework. The batch size
was set to 22. To prevent the instability of the model gradient during the initial training,
a stochastic gradient optimizer (SGD) with momentum was used for 350 rounds of pre-
warm-up training, with the initialized learning rate set to 8 × 10−6 , the momentum set to
0.9, and the weight decay rate set to 0.0005. After that, using the Adam optimizer with an
initialized learning rate of 0.01 to retrain the model. After 2500 epochs, the learning rate
automatically lowers to 0.1 times the initial rate. The smoothing constants are, respectively,
0.90 and 0.999, and the weight decay rate is 0.0005. Fifteen thousand epochs make up the
entire number of iteration epochs.
Applying data augmentation techniques would improve the robustness and gener-
alization performance of the model for various input image target sizes and shapes. The
improved SSD algorithm makes use of data augmentation techniques, such as randomly
flipping each training image with a probability of 50% and randomly altering the image
color with a brightness of 0.125, contrast of 0.5, saturation of 0.5, and hue of 0.05. Randomly
cropping the picture helps improve the detection precision of small-scale objects. The figure
depicts the progress of the random cropping algorithm (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Flow chart of random cropping algorithm.

4.2. Introduction to the Dataset

All the datasets utilized in the tests are from the open source EDS dataset of Beijing
University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and MEGVII Research Institute, which com-
prises 14,219 photos from 3 distinct X-ray machines, 10 classes of objects, and 31,655 target
instances in total. Existing X-ray imaging technologies display various colors for detecting
various objects. Images of inorganic objects are in shades of blue, images of organic objects
are in shades of orange, images of mixtures are in shades of green, and images of things that
X-rays can not get through are in shades of red. The detected target’s color, size, and shape
are used to label different data sets to tell them apart. The network learns how to perform
target detection based on existing labeled data. During the training phase, the data set was
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 14 of 22

randomly picked and separated into a training set of 11,375 images designated EDS_10K
and a test set of 2843 images in a ratio of 4:1. Five thousand images were taken from the
training set and named EDS_5K to facilitate the ablation experiment. Figure 9 shows the
sample distribution of the dataset. In general, the target samples are relatively evenly
distributed. The uniformly distributed number of targets enables the target detection
network to obtain meaningful feature representation capability without overly favoring
certain data, improving model generalization capability. In addition, the image detection
targets are classified into three classes based on the COCO dataset classification criteria.
Detection targets smaller than 32 pixels are classified as “small targets”, detection targets
larger than 32 pixels but less than 96 pixels are classified as “medium targets”, and detection
targets larger than 96 pixels are classified as “large targets”. The specific statistical figures
are shown in Figure 10. Since targets of different scales exist, it is possible to verify the
improved algorithm’s detection accuracy for multi-scale targets.

area( B p ∩ Bgt )
IOU = (14)
area( B p ∩ Bgt )

TP
TPR = (15)
TP + FP
TP
FPR = (16)
TP + FN

Figure 9. (Left) Number of target instances in EDS_5k. (Right) Number of target instances in
EDS_10k.

Figure 10. (Left) Distribution of targets by scale for EDS_5k. (Right) Distribution of targets by scale
for EDS_10k.
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 15 of 22

4.3. Assessment Criteria

To illustrate the model’s detection accuracy, mAP, currently the most widely used
evaluation index in image processing, is used to measure the detection accuracy of the
model. At the same time, the detection speed of the model is measured by the number
of parameters as well as the actual inference speed. Intersection over union separates the
true negative, false positive, and negative samples. The mAP value is calculated by the
intersection over union ratio between the prediction result and the true sample. Finally,
the prediction boxes are arranged from most confident to least confident. The detection
accuracy of the model is shown by calculating the precision rate and the recall rate, and
the P-R curve of the model is drawn. The final mAP value is obtained by calculating the
weighted P-R curve area of each category, as shown in Equations (14)–(16).

4.4. Analysis and Comparison of Experimental Results

During the experiment, the loss decrease during the training phase for the EDS_5k
dataset is depicted in Figure 10. Compared to the existing mainstream target detection
algorithms, the improved SSD algorithm on the EDS_5k dataset achieved 78.7% in mAP
value. Finally, by training the model on EDS_10k, OPIXray, and DBF6 while keeping
the test set unchanged, the mAP value improved by 1.9%, and the loss function during
training is shown in Figure 11. Adjusting the learning rate to 0.1 times the current learning
rate helps hasten the network’s convergence if, during the training of a specific epoch, the
network convergence pace begins to slow, and the loss value’s declining trend begins to stall.
The model’s final measured number of parameters was 34.82 M, and the inference speed
decreased to 48 ms. The improved model significantly increased the effect of detecting
small targets, up to 5.1% of the mAP value. It improved the effect of detecting medium
targets by 8.8% and large targets by 7.5%. Table 3 displays the experimental outcomes of the
improved SSD algorithm in comparison to the most prevalent target detection algorithms
currently in use. The final results demonstrate that the newly added algorithm outperforms
the other fundamental algorithms by a significant margin. Notably, only the information
granules in their space are utilized by G-RCNN networks.

Figure 11. (Left) Warm-up training. (Right) Official training.

The improved model can obtain the highest mAP value of 80.6% at an input image
size of 300 × 300 while maintaining a high inference speed. The original model can achieve
a detection accuracy comparable to the input image size of 512 × 512 (mAP value of 80.3%).
Still, the inference speed of the original model is only 196 ms due to the sharp increase in
the default anchor frames (98112), which is caused by the increase in the input image size.
Multiple sets of ablation experiments were conducted on the EDS_ 5K dataset to determine
the effectiveness of each module. The network detection accuracy could be improved by
0.8% after replacing the backbone network; the multi-scale feature extraction module could
improve the model detection accuracy by 0.9%; the multi-scale attention module could
improve the model detection accuracy by 0.7%. Table 4 shows the results of the ablation
experiments. The class activation heat map also confirms the multi-scale attention module’s
effectiveness by visualizing prediction results. The images are depicted in Figure 12, where
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 16 of 22

the first row of images is the actual image and its label (in the orange box), the second row
is the class activation heat map without the multi-scale attention module, and the third
row is the improved class activation heat map. The results of the forecast are depicted in
Figure 13. In plotting the prediction results, the results after non-maximal suppression for
targets with thresholds below 0.4 are filtered out, indicating that the model can recognize
all types of objects with high confidence.

Table 3. Comparison of mainstream methods.

Inference
Approach mAP0.5 mAP0.75 mAPs mAPm mAPl
Speed (ms)
Fast-RCNN 67.2 45.7 57.8 71.5 72.3 396
Faster-RCNN 69.9 46.3 58.3 74.9 76.5 142
G-RCNN 77.3 55.1 61.4 83.9 88.4 89
YOLOv4 75.1 53.5 49.7 88.4 87.2 33
YOLOv5 75.5 55.5 49.7 87.8 89.3 28
YOLOv7 77.2 55.5 52.3 88.7 90.6 37
SSD300 74.4 51.9 47.5 85.3 87.4 52
DSSD321 75.9 53.3 55.1 85.1 87.5 67
Improved SSD300 78.7 56.0 52.6 90.3 93.2 47
Improved SSD300 (10k) 80.6 56.3 52.6 94.1 95.1 47

Table 4. Ablation experiments.

Approach Backbone mAP

SSD300 VGG16 74.4
SSD300 ResNet50 75.2
SSD + MSE ResNet50 76.1
SSD + MSA ResNet50 77.5
SSD + MSE + MSA ResNet50 78.7

Figure 12. Visualization results of the class activation map.

Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 17 of 22

Figure 13. Prediction effect.

X-ray images are frequently densely packed with objects and heavily obscured. Tradi-
tional non-maximum suppression methods typically set the confidence of predicted anchor
frames with an intersection ratio exceeding a threshold of 0. This frequently results in the
loss of overlapping targets. As a result, redundant prediction anchor frames are filtered
out using a combination of Adaptive-NMS [40] and Soft-NMS [41] in the post-processing
phase. Equation (17) is subsequently used to calculate the target density, where the density
of object i is defined as the maximum bounding box IoU with other objects in the set of
ground truth G. Equations (18) and (19) are utilized to execute Soft-NMS, reducing the
confidence score of the predicted target frame. NM represents the adaptive NMS threshold
for M, and dM is the object's density that M covers.

di := max iou(bi , b j ) (17)

bi ∈ G,i 6= j
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 18 of 22

NM := max( Nt , d M ) (18)
si , iou( M, bi ) < NM
si = (19)
si f (iou( M, bi )), iou( M, bi ) < NM
The feature layer extracted by the backbone network is first reduced using 1 × 1
convolution, followed by splicing the output tensor of the feature prediction layer with
the output tensor of the classification network and the anchor frame regression network.
A 5 × 5 convolution kernel is used in the last layer of the density network to consider
the surrounding information. Finally, the results are mapped to the [0, 1] interval by the
Softmax operation. The final output dimension is kept the same as the output dimension of
the anchor frame regression network. In particular, since the density prediction network
needs to use 5 × 5 convolutional kernels to generate the final results, only the first four
feature prediction layers are added to the density prediction network. The density sub-
network is shown in Figure 14. The total model detection accuracy was improved by
1.2 mAP values. The specific enhancement results are shown in Table 5.

Figure 14. Density subnet.

Table 5. The prediction results of different non-maximum suppression.

NMS Approach mAP0.5 mAP0.75 mAPs mAPm mAPl

greedy NMS 80.6 56.3 52.6 94.1 95.2
Adaptive-NMS 81.1 55.9 52.6 95.1 95.6
Adaptive-NMS + Soft-NMS 81.8 58.0 52.9 95.8 96.7

In addition to further evaluating and validating the effectiveness of the proposed

multi-scale attention module and multi-scale attention module, we conducted additional
experiments on the DBF6 and OPIXray datasets. The DBF6 dataset contains six types of
tools with varying degrees of occlusion, and the OPIXray dataset contains five types of
stacked tools. In the DBF6 dataset, FA denotes firearm, FP denotes firearm part, CA denotes
camera, KN denotes knife, CK denotes ceramic knife, and LA denotes laptop. In the
OPIXray dataset, FO represents Folding Knife, ST represents Straight Knife, SC represents
Scissor, UT represents Utility Knife, and MU represents multi-tool Knife. In a ratio of
4:1, each dataset was divided into training and test sets. On the OPIXRay dataset, the
training set contains 80% of the images (7109), and the test set contains 20% (1776). On the
DBF6 dataset, the training set contains 12,360 images, and the test set contains 3089 images.
During the experiment, we uniformly scale the images to 300 × 300 size before feeding
them into the neural network. All models were optimized by the SGD optimizer with the
learning rate set to 0.0001. The batch size was set to 22, and the momentum and weight
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 19 of 22

decay were set to 0.9 and 0.0005, respectively. We evaluated the average mean precision
(mAP) of the target detection to measure the performance of the models, and the IOU
threshold was set to 0.5.
In the OPIXRay dataset, the literature [22] proposes a de-obscuring attention module
(DOAM) to capture edge information and area information separately. SSD, YOLOv3, and
FCOS network architectures were selected as baselines into which the DOAM modules
were incorporated to verify the improvements. The same baseline was chosen to fuse the
MSA and MSE coupling modules separately when performing comparison tests. In the
DBF dataset, the original paper focused on transfer learning of X-ray images and used
Faster-RCNN and R-FCN networks as baselines. In the same way, we used the two network
architectures above as a baseline to compare the work of our proposed modules. The
experimental comparison results demonstrate that the proposed modules can significantly
improve the detection precision of all categories on the DBF6 dataset. The detection
accuracy of all categories exceeded 90% except for Knife, a tiny target. The improved
SSD model on the OPIXray dataset outperformed the DOMA architecture reported in the
literature [22] and attained the best detection accuracy of 82.9% mAP. The performance of
multi-scale feature extraction and multi-scale attention integration network on YOLOv3 and
FCOS improved the detection accuracy by 0.9% and 0.2%, respectively. The experimental
results of DBF6 dataset are shown in Table 6, and OPIXray dataset are shown in Table 7.
The detection results are shown in Figure 15.

Table 6. DBF6 contrast experiments.

Baseline Method Dataset mAP0.5 FA FP CA KN CK LA Inference (ms)

Fast-RCNN Transfer Learned DBF6 85.1 91.6 90.1 84.4 67.7 88.9 87.9 150
Fast-RCNN MSA + MSE DBF6 88.3 92.1 92.5 90.1 71.9 91.4 91.8 175
R-FCN Transfer Learned DBF6 85.6 94.2 92.5 88.7 55.6 92.0 90.6 85
R-FCN MSA + MSE DBF6 89.5 94.7 92.9 91.7 65.9 96.6 95.2 93

Table 7. OPIXray contrast experiments.

Baseline Method Dataset mAP0.5 FO ST SC UT MU Inference (ms)

YOLOv3 DOAM OPIXray 79.3 90.2 41.7 97.0 72.1 95.5 23
YOLOv3 MSA + MSE OPIXray 80.2 91.3 41.7 97.8 74.3 95.9 30
FCOS DOAM OPIXray 82.4 86.7 68.6 90.2 78.8 87.7 26
FCOS MSA + MSE OPIXray 82.6 86.9 69.3 90.2 80.3 85.7 34
SSD DOAM OPIXray 74.1 81.4 41.5 95.1 68.2 84.3 55
SSD MSA + MSE OPIXray 82.9 92.1 59.7 97.5 73.3 91.9 41

Figure 15. OPIXray data set prediction results.

5. Conclusions
In this research, we propose an enhanced multi-scale target detection method based
on the SSD algorithm, which seeks to increase the detection accuracy of the model for
each scale target while ensuring the model’s detection speed. We use the EDS dataset
as our primary training dataset. With approximately 22 pictures per second, the current
mainstream model achieves its highest detection accuracy. The modified Resnet 50 network
architecture replaces the original VGG network to improve the feature extraction capability
Sensors 2022, 22, 7836 20 of 22

of the backbone network while reducing the number of network parameters. A multi-scale
feature extraction module is designed with stacked convolutional kernels of different sizes.
The algorithm’s performance is further enhanced by maximizing the feature expression
potential of the output feature map of the backbone network. In addition, a multi-scale
attention mechanism is intended to improve the detection impact by concentrating feature
information at various scales in both channel and spatial dimensions. Ablation experiments
demonstrate that adding multi-scale feature extraction and multi-scale attention coupling
mechanisms into a model improves its detection accuracy compared to employing only
one of the modules. Ultimately, we combine our newly developed multi-scale multi-feature
extraction and attention coupling modules with other target detection models on different
X-ray datasets. The results of the experiments show that the new architecture works well
with other datasets.

6. Discussion
This paper provides a reliable solution for intelligent security screening. This paper
proposes a method with better results than the fast detection speed but low detection
accuracy of the YOLO series and the slow detection speed of the original SSD algorithm.
The idea is mainly to consider that authentic images will generally contain targets of
various scales in real life. It is often difficult to adapt to targets of different scales by
using a fixed-size convolution kernel. It can be seen that this study uses ResNet_50 as the
backbone network to save the computational overhead in network inference as much as
possible. Reasonable speculation is that if a deeper neural network such as ResNet-101
or Res2Net-101 is used as the backbone network, it can further improve the detection
accuracy of the model. In addition, the model can still be further improved in terms of the
number of parameters and detection speed, and a more lightweight model still needs to be
researched in the future. In this paper, the contrast of X-ray images is made higher during
data enhancement so that the existing network can directly predict targets in different color
gamuts. However, the network architecture for detecting targets in different color gamuts
separately still needs more research.

Author Contributions: Supervision, H.J.; writing—original draft, F.S.; writing—review and editing,
Y.L.; validation, X.Z. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51865054)
and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Foundation Project (No. 2022D01A117).
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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