Description du projet
Une nouvelle technologie pour les scanners des inspections douanières et frontalières
Le spectre des produits contrefaits et piratés qui franchissent les frontières est vaste et en pleine expansion. Actuellement, seule une infime partie du fret est inspectée, et une proportion encore plus faible des marchandises illégales est détectée par les agents des douanes. Il convient de disposer de nouvelles technologies pour compléter les scanners à rayons gamma et à rayons X utilisés pour inspecter les marchandises aux frontières. Le projet SilentBorder, financé par l’UE, met au point un nouveau scanner de tomographie à rayons cosmiques (CRT) de pointe qui permet de contrôler, de détecter et d’identifier, de manière rapide et entièrement sûre, les marchandises dangereuses et illégales, les articles de contrebande et les personnes qui se dissimulent dans les conteneurs. Le scanner CRT est capable de distinguer les différents matériaux, de les localiser à l’intérieur de la cargaison et de fournir des images 3D.
Objectif
Everyday our customs workers need to tackle counterfeit goods and piracy to protect the health and safety of our citizens, yet it is estimated that only a small fraction of cargo is inspected and even smaller fraction of illegal goods are detected. Today, the most widely used technology for scanning vehicles, ranging from vans and trucks to railcars, is gamma-ray and X-ray radiography. But new technologies are required for overcoming current technological shortcomings like inability to detect the materials, usage of radioactive and harmful source, low throughput to name some.
Cosmic-ray tomography (CRT) is considered as beyond the state-of-the-art technology in cargo screening. Cosmic-ray muons are highly penetrating, their average energy is about 10,000 times the energy of a typical X-ray and they are practically non-absorbable. They are suitable to identify materials hidden inside of shielded material, too thick or deep for other imaging methods. The CRT is completely passive, exploiting naturally occurring secondary cosmic radiation. Contrary to conventional X-ray or gamma-based imaging techniques it allows to distinguish between different materials and localizes it inside the cargo or vehicle by providing visualised 3D image.
We will bridge the major security gap for fast and safe inspection of large number of cargos by developing the Multi-Functional Passive Detection System. The detection capability is based on using high accuracy sensors for particle tracking in combination with beyond state-of-the art tomographic reconstruction and material classification algorithms.
The main objective of SilentBorder is to develop and validate a new high-technology CRT scanner for border guard, customs and LEAs that enables safe and fast screening, detection and identification of hazardous and illegal goods (e.g. SNM), contraband (e.g. tobacco or explosive) as well as hidden persons in up to 20’ iso containers.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinateur
51005 Tartu
Estonie