Locations must often be secured to ensure public safety and welfare. For example, places where there are large concentrations of people, such as airports or entertainment events, places that are of particular governmental importance, such as courthouses and government buildings, and other places where the threat of violence is high, such as prisons, require security measures to thwart dangerous or illegal activities. The primary security objective is to prevent the unauthorized entry of weapons, dangerous materials, illegal items, or other contraband into the location, thereby securing it. This is often achieved by requiring all people and items to enter into the location through defined checkpoints and, in those checkpoints, subjecting those people and items to thorough searches.
Currently, various devices are used to perform such searches. Regardless of the place of use, these detection systems are employed to detect the presence of contraband on the body or luggage of individuals entering the secure area. Contraband is not limited to weapons and arms, but rather it includes explosives (fireworks, ammunition, sparklers, matches, gunpowder, signal flares); weapons (guns, swords, pepper sprays, martial arts weapons, knives); pressurized containers (hair sprays, insect repellant, oxygen/propane tanks); poisons (insecticides, pesticides, arsenic, cyanide); household items (flammable liquids, solvents, bleach); and corrosives (acids, lye, mercury).
People screening systems such as metal detectors are deployed at defined checkpoints to detect threat items such as weapons, explosives, and other dangerous objects concealed under clothing and within clothing. Such conventional security systems rely on data independently recorded at the time of screening to evaluate the possibility of a concealed threat item. There exist a wide range of threat items, which are difficult to be automatically and conclusively detected by automated algorithmic-based detection systems thereby necessitating a need for physical search of personnel. A full physical or a body pat-down search is often time-consuming, resource-intensive, and uncomfortable for both the security personnel and the subject under inspection. The time consumed in performing full-body pat-downs further decreases throughput, thus making the process slow and inconvenient for other subjects who are in queue for security screening.
The conventional security systems such as metal detector systems do not rely on any kind of data driven artificial intelligence. These devices are not intelligent and do not relate the search results during a screening process with the past screening history of an individual. Every screened passenger is evaluated in the same way irrespective of the things he or she normally carries or the way he or she dresses. A typical metal detector system works to detect the presence of any conducting object present with the screened person in his or her clothing or belongings. In several instances, people normally wear or carry conducting objects such as metal ornaments or keys or a writing instrument. A typical metal detector is unable to conclusively distinguish between a threat element and a metal based non threat element such as a writing instrument leading to false alarm during the screening process. This generally requires the security personnel to perform a full body pat-down search of the screened personnel leading to inconvenience and reduced throughput.
In addition, screening checkpoints used in current security systems predominately operate using a single input and single output line approach. Because the metal detectors are unable to conclusively distinguish between threat items and non-threat items which are made of conducting materials, the complex security protocols being instituted require individuals to get many of their belongings such as wallets, mobile phones, keys and other items, scanned by an X-ray scanner. Usually this is done because some of these non-threat items can trigger false alarms when the individual passes through the metal detector. It takes a considerable amount of time for individuals to divest themselves of their belongings and to place them for separate screening. This divestiture process tends to happen serially with individuals waiting in line until they have access to the machine. Contributing to the lag associated with the divestiture process, current systems employ a single conveyor belt, upon which each of the individual passenger items must be placed in order for the items to pass through the x-ray machine. Once the items are scanned, they accumulate on the opposite side of the scanning machine, thus creating “traffic” on the belt until retrieved by the passenger/owner. The belt must often be stopped by the operator to prevent the backlog of unclaimed baggage from reversing into the x-ray machine.
U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 14/944,067, 14/859,647, 14/531,485, 14/293,233, 14/280,774, 14/149,473, 14/104,508, 13/942,563, 13/903,598, 13/365,114, 13/175,785, 12/887,510, and 12/643,021 and U.S. Pat. Nos. 9,182,516, 8,995,619, 8,774,362, 8,766,764, 8,654,922, 8,638,904, 8,576,982, 8,199,996, 8,135,112, 7,826,589, 7,796,733, 7,660,388, and 7,418,077 all disclose people screening systems and are all incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Despite the prior art efforts to improve methods, apparatuses, and systems for scanning individuals and carry-on baggage, the abovementioned problems have not been solved. The prior art methods fail to disclose methods and systems that reasonably alleviate delay during the divestiture process. In addition, the prior art does not improve the overall efficiency and throughput of the system.
Accordingly, there is need for an integrated system and process for effectively managing the flow of people through screening procedures. There is a need for an improved security check station that reduces the waiting time for individuals and has improved throughput and efficiency. Such a system would reduce over-staffing of security personnel, facilitate automation of the metal detector, curtail idle time of machine operators, and significantly increase throughput of the machines.
There is a need for an intelligent screening system that is able to evaluate the possibility of threat items based on the past screening history or a benchmark screening pattern for any individual. There is a need for an intelligent screening system where the plurality of information is centrally processed for yielding specific outputs to different users.