To keep ahead of evolving threats the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is initiating a new program aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art in Non-Intrusive Inspection (NII) systems used to scan cargo and containers for potential threats.
“In general the bad guys are getting better at camouflaging the bad stuff,” which in turn is driving the need for better NII systems, Anh Duong, director of the Borders and Maritime Division within the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, tells TR2. The mission of NII equipment remains the same, that is to detect, identify and interdict threats, but what has “changed is the technical prowess of those trying to enter the United States. They’ve gotten more sophisticated. They’ve gotten better at their game so we have to get better at our game,” she says.
The new CanScan program that Duong’s division is gearing up for its customers in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Transportation Security Administration will lead to a Request for Information later this year and a program start in FY ’10, Duong says. She declined to say how much money will be budgeted for the program until Congress completes its work on the FY ’10 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill.
Duong says that DHS needs to move beyond the single energy, low-pulse ionizing systems such as gamma ray and X-Ray NII equipment currently used at U.S. land and seaports and overseas ports to inspect cargo and containers. The bad guys are getting better at hiding what they want to hide so that low-energy NII systems can’t penetrate and see the illegal material or goods, she says.
Under CanScan DHS hopes to develop NII systems that can either automatically or manually vary the energy to improve penetration of all cargo areas regardless of density, Duong says.
“How do you get the best of both worlds?” Duong says.
Basically, low-energy NII systems can’t penetrate high density cargo such as machine parts and liquids whereas high energy NII systems can penetrate high density cargo but are less effective when looking at low density regions where drugs and explosives are frequently found, Duong says.
This requirement is being driven by operators of the equipment, Duong says. One of the challenges is how an operator would know when to vary the scanning for low and high density cargo and vice versa, she says.
Another challenge beyond the ability to combine low and high energy scanning in one system is being able to provide sufficient image quality fast enough for the operator to act quickly and accurately on the information, Duong says. Ideally the goal is to achieve three-dimensional imagery and CanScan will strive to move in this direction, she says. That means more processing and storage capacity to generate the additional data, she adds.
Another goal is to be able to provide elemental discrimination to identify what it is that an operator is looking at, Duong says. That’s because “in theory” the bad guys can camouflage their goods with legitimate materials of similar densities, she says.
By improving accuracy that should also help with throughput, Duong says. She also says that whatever emerges from CanScan must also work with CBP’s Automated Target Recognition system, which is a risk analysis scorecard that allows the agency to narrow what cargo and containers should be scanned with NII systems and which ones don’t represent a potential threat.