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PinPoint™ Threat Identification Software
Guardian Technologies' PinPoint™ threat identification software increases the number of high-level threat items discovered in baggage, enhances employee productivity, and may significantly reduce waiting time for airline passengers. PinPoint brings immediate safety and economic benefits to the transportation industry, which seeks to maximize screening accuracy and efficiency for carry-on bags, checked baggage, and airline and sea cargo containers.
Combining sophisticated analysis and algorithms PinPoint is an automated threat identification and detection solution that more than doubles the accuracy rate of traditional airport checkpoint baggage scanning equipment. PinPoint's technology integrates with existing baggage scanners to identify high-level threat items, such as guns, C4, and other types of explosives that are difficult or impossible for trained baggage scanning personnel to detect using traditional X-ray images. PinPoint has an unprecedented detection accuracy rate and an unrivaled “false positive” rate. The enhanced accuracy of Guardian Technologies' PinPoint technology has profound implications for air travel safety, passenger throughput, and security overhead reduction.
Enhances Air Travel Safety
When used with traditional scanning equipment, PinPoint acts as a "second set of eyes" for baggage screening employees. Utilizing patent-pending imaging filters and algorithms, PinPoint performs a complex analysis process to detect contraband within a scanned image, "seeing" in ways that security personnel cannot. Instead of relying on people to associate different colors in an image on their monitor with different types of threat items, PinPoint automatically notifies the screener of the type of threat item detected and identifies its location, making it far more difficult for threat items to pass through checkpoints undetected. By significantly reducing the potential for human error, PinPoint effectively increases the overall safety of air travel. Additionally, PinPoint's ability to identify threat item type enables security personnel to determine the best course of action for threat containment.
Increases Passenger/Baggage Throughput
Each year, approximately one billion bags are screened at U.S. airports. With “false positives” often exceeding 30% because screeners can't accurately identify threat items using existing baggage scanning equipment, hundreds of thousands of bags must be hand-searched each day. As a result, flights and passengers are delayed, increasing the hassles of air travel and wasting thousands of man-hours. In fact, the average wait time per passenger is currently more than 10 minutes.
PinPoint eliminates the majority of physical searches with its superior ability to instantly determine if threat items are present, and identify their type and location. Additionally, PinPoint may speed up the rate at which both checked and carry-on bags are scanned. Currently, TSA rules require that human screeners view each bag's X-ray image for a minimum of five seconds, even if they are certain no threat item is present. PinPoint's highly accurate, sub-second, “second opinion” threat identification may make it feasible for the TSA to reduce the viewing time required for each image from five seconds to as little as 1.5 seconds. As a result, the airline industry's baggage throughput rate could potentially triple.
Reduces Security Overhead
PinPoint can also significantly reduce security overhead costs. For example, a typical high-volume airport serves 65,000 airline passengers on average each day. Leveraging PinPoint's automated threat identification capabilities, the airport could potentially save 55 man-hours of baggage screening time per day, or the equivalent of almost seven eight-hour shifts per day. With more than 440 commercial airports in the U.S. employing 56,000 baggage screeners, the potential for overhead savings within the airline industry is staggering.
How PinPoint Works
Just as computer analysis and algorithms are used to determine the unobservable characteristics of stellar bodies light years away, PinPoint uses similar methods to distinguish minute variations in X-ray images that are impossible for the human eye to differentiate.
Plastic explosives, and other threat items, have specific densities and characteristics, which may be similar to those of non-threat items contained in baggage. The X-ray images produced by current baggage scanning technology often do not differentiate between threat and non-threat items enough to capture a human operator’s attention. PinPoint uses sophisticated algorithms to scan the image for characteristics of items contained in its threat list. When a threat is detected, Pinpoint immediately places a red box around the image of the suspected threat item, and sends a warning message to the operator stating the type of threat item found. Because mathematical analysis can distinguish minute variations in an image far more reliably than the human eye, PinPoint consistently detects even the most cleverly hidden or disguised threat items. Moreover, Pinpoint’s identification capabilities increase with the quantity of data.
Additional PinPoint Applications
PinPoint's unique identification capabilities can extend far beyond airport baggage scanning. Guardian Technologies is currently adapting PinPoint for additional applications, which include:
• Cargo scanning
• Body scanning
• Package scanning for schools, hospitals, entertainment venues,
and government office buildings
• Satellite image enhancement and identification
• Medical imaging
• Illegal drug detection
For more information to arrange for a product demo please call
703.464.5495 or email: info@guardiantechintl.com