I Made Things Weird Trying TSA’s New Shoe Scanner Machine
The TSA is working on new scanners that’ll let you keep your shoes on when traveling through security checkpoints at airports. CNET’s Bridget Carey gets an early look at how the technology works, and tries to mess up her test.
The TSA is testing new technology to be able to scan your shoe at the security check without you having to take your shoe off at the airport. But let’s make it interesting. Maybe I should put something in my shoe and see what happens on the scanner machine. So the TSA is testing a new way to scan your shoe at the airport so you don’t have to take your shoe off through security, and I got to test it out a bit. The millimeter wave of technology is scanning your foot, and through all the data they’re seen as something different is something a foot perhaps. That’s a bad pun, but I did it. All right, so what kind of information can a TSA agent get from this? Um, officers at the checkpoint, should this be deployed just like the body scanners would never actually review the images. Everything would be run by automated detection algorithms, so the officer would get a red light or a green light. Essentially saying, are the shoes good to go or do we need to do further inspection? Oh, so they’re not getting feet picks. No, no, no, absolutely not. Well, the computer though, it’s looking for things that don’t look like a normal foot. What is it looking for? We’re looking at a variety of machine learning based techniques, um, whether that’s trying to detect shoes that have been tampered with, whether that’s looking for specific material properties, but continuing to grow our data sets so that we can um pick the approaches that will work best in the field. So you have two shoes right here, um. What are we seeing in this demo? Yeah, so these are two regular out of the box sneakers. Um, and then in the right foot, we have a piece of foam that’s essentially invisible to the millimeter wave system. And then embedded in there, we’ve got a metallic letter F. So as you collect the scan, it sends the millimeter waves up through the shoe and you’ll get it reconstructed into depth slices. So you actually look as if you were slicing through the shoe going up. So you’ll see the sole, you’ll see the insole, and then you’ll eventually see the metallic F just appear in the uh in the right hand shoe. How long does a scan take? It takes right now about 1 2nd and essentially as soon as the antennas are done rotating, we’re able to reconstruct that image. I’m ready to be scanned. All right, let’s do it. So my score is a little weird. Your score is definitely a little weird. All right, let me show you what I did. OK. I just found odd shaped things, plastic knife, gummies and condiments. So, so right there you’ve got what looks like the packet and then going through you also can see the outline of the knife there. Um, I, I, I’m not sure I see the gummy worm, so we may need to do some additional development to be able to detect those effectively. I hope this is useful data. That can help the cause. I will, uh, I, I will be sure to pass this along to the team and they will be happy to uh to use that as part of the development. All right, so we should do a test control when I don’t have anything in my shoes. Yes, why not. 1.13. 0, my score is normal now, 1.13. OK. I passed. Let’s talk about the goal here. As we’re moving towards trying to get to a more seamless travel experience, we know that’s something that the traveling public, um, would like to no longer have to take their shoes off. Um, so bringing this technology to passengers is something that we think is, uh, something they’ll be really excited about. This is still a prototype and they’re collecting data here at CES in Las Vegas. Listen in the comments what you think about it. Thanks for watching.
