Abstract
The prominence of aviation security has increased dramatically in recent years. As a reaction to the new threat situation
large investments into modern security technology have been made.
State-of-the-art X-ray screening equipment provides high resolution
images, many image enhancement features and even automatic
explosive detection. However, the most expensive equipment is of
limited value if the humans who operate it are not selected and
trained to perform their task accurately and efficiently. In fact,
according to several experts, the human operator is currently the
weakest link in aviation security. This article presents results of
studies conducted over the last four years which clearly show that
threat detection in X-ray images can be increased substantially by
investing into human factors technologies that are based on results of
visual cognition, object recognition and psychophysics.
