Investigating training and transfer effects resulting from recurrent CBT of X-ray image interpretation

Abstract

The importance of airport security has increased dramatically in the last years.Large investments into x-ray screening technology have been made in order to cope with the changed terrorist threat situation.However, the most expensive equipment is of limited value if the humans who operate it are not trained well enough to detect threat objects in x-ray images of passenger bags quickly and reliably.In this study we investigated whether adaptive computer based training (CBT) can be used to increase x-ray image interpretation competency of airport security screeners.To this end, we tested screeners before and after six months of weekly recurrent CBT using X-Ray Tutor (XRT).A control group of screeners was tested as well but this group did not receive training with XRT.Large increases in detection performance were found for the training group, which did also generalize to new threat objects that were not shown during training.The results of this study indicate that recurrent CBT can be a powerful tool to increase the x-ray image interpretation competency of screeners.