EM-YOLO: An X-ray Prohibited-Item-Detection Method Based on Edge and Material Information Fusion

Using X-ray imaging in security inspections is common for the detection of objects. X-ray security images have strong texture and RGB features as well as the characteristics of background clutter and object overlap, which makes X-ray imaging very different from other real-world imaging methods. To better detect prohibited items in security X-ray images with these characteristics, we propose EM-YOLOv7, which is composed of both an edge feature extractor (EFE) and a material feature extractor (MFE). We used the Soft-WIoU NMS method to solve the problem of object overlap. To better extract features, the attention mechanism CBAM was added to the backbone. According to the results of several experiments on the SIXray dataset, our EM-YOLOv7 method can better complete prohibited-item-detection tasks during security inspection with detection accuracy that is 4% and 0.9% higher than that of YOLOv5 and YOLOv7, respectively, and other SOTA models.