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Tom Temin The Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) works to develop new technologies and get them into commercial production. A lot of work has focused on technologies to speed up airport screening, and make it more accurate. Now a unit of science and technology has won an interagency partnership award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium,…
Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.
Tom Temin The Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) works to develop new technologies and get them into commercial production. A lot of work has focused on technologies to speed up airport screening, and make it more accurate. Now a unit of science and technology has won an interagency partnership award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium, specifically High Definition Advanced Imaging and shoe scanner technologies. Program manager John Fortune joined The Federal Drive with Tom Temin.
Tom Temin Well, tell us first of all about the technologies here because, you know, it’s kind of true, but people maybe overlooked the fact that over the years screening at airports really has improved many, many times over then it kind of kind of looked back to the early days to realize how far they’ve come. So tell us what these two latest technologies are that were able to be commercialized?
John Fortune Sure. So while there had been really considerable areas of progress in airport screening, as you mentioned, over the last 10 to 15 to 20 years, there are some technologies that have been in the airport for quite some time, including the current what we call advanced imaging technologies, which are the passenger screening systems. The current versions in the airports were rolled out in the 2009 to 2010 timeframe. And what we’re basically doing is looking at a next generation version of that system. Think about standard definition television versus high definition television. This is, but we call it the HD-AIT, it’s the High Definition Advanced Imaging System. And what it does is it provides a much crisper, clearer picture of passengers and potential threats as they pass through that system. But it’s also coupled with the automatic algorithm so that the threat detection is automated, nobody views any images, as has always been the case for TSA for a very long time. So we’re basically trying to come up with a system that is much more effective in detecting threats on passengers, but also doesn’t pick up what we call false alarms. A false alarm is simply you have an item, clothing item, for example, that somehow shows up as a threat, when in fact, it’s just a pocket on your shirt. And that results often in secondary screening and passenger pat downs, it slows down the line, it’s not good for the passenger. It’s obviously not something TSA wants to have to do. So the better image that you can get and the better the computer algorithms are that are coupled with that system, the less likely it is that you’re gonna have to pat down people. So it really does two things. It detects threats better, but also is designed to get rid of some of these annoying pat downs that travelers have to deal with.
Tom Temin And on the shoe side that’s kind of coupled with this, I guess.
John Fortune Yeah, absolutely. So the shoe issue has been one that’s really been kind of a tough nut to crack. Going back almost 15 years ago, passengers have been required to remove their footwear when they are traveling. And it’s a challenge to image footwear, because there’s lots of different…
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