Animated depth employing image synthesis for 3D security X-ray imaging

We demonstrate the production of synthetic X-ray images by employing the scale invariant feature transform or SIFT in combination with epipolar morphing. The synthetic images are employed in a novel multiple view X-ray imaging technique to produce an animated or kinetic depth effect in a visual display. The synthetic views reduce the total number of X-ray detectors required during the image acquisition process. A quantitative analysis of the feature matching performance of the SIFT is presented along with a comparative study of the synthetic imagery. We show that the total number of matches produced by SIFT reduces as the angular separation between the generating views increases. This effect is accompanied by an increase in the total number of synthetic pixel errors. The trends observed are obtained from 15 different luggage items.