Surveillance of incoming ships and scanning of containers onboard these ships are two important elements of port security. This responsibility of identifying vessels that pose a threat generally rely radars and cameras to perform these tasks.
Still, development of new sensors is being undertaken for situations where radars and cameras might not work. New projects have been formed, in collaboration with government agencies, such as the development of small and inexpensive sonar buoy arrays to find the presence of somebody out there who might be difficult to see with both radar and camera.
Scanning of containers that come into ports are usually the responsibilities of customs personnel to ensure that materials on board do not pose a threat, such as toxic or radiological substances being smuggled into the country.
Government agencies have used X-ray devices used for such scanning for illegal drugs and goods.
But as threat no includes weapons of mass destruction that may be concealed in cargo containers, port security finds it self working in coordination with several government agencies to address this situation.
One possible solution is the operation of a gantry system using a conventional X-ray technology in order to reveal contraband by transmitting X-rays through substances, as well as proprietary Z Backscatter X-Ray imaging, and find hidden substances through scattered X-rays.
X-rays react much like normal visible light in many ways in that sometimes materials absorb them, transmit them or scatter them. By generating X-rays based off scattering, container scanning can be performed for these security purposes. Different materials scatter X-rays differently, depending upon what type of material it is. Heavy materials, like those made out of metals, tend not to scatter X-rays much at all, whereas less dense materials scatter X-rays to a high degree. A lot of threat items that people are interested in happen to be organic in nature.
To-date, a vehicle-mounted version of this backscatter X-ray system provide a mobile approach to this container or vehicle screening system.
