  This work addresses the question whether it is possible to design a
computer-vision based automatic threat recognition (ATR) system so that it can
adapt to changing specifications of a threat without having to create a new ATR
each time. The changes in threat specifications, which may be warranted by
intelligence reports and world events, are typically regarding the physical
characteristics of what constitutes a threat: its material composition, its
shape, its method of concealment, etc. Here we present our design of an AATR
system (Adaptive ATR) that can adapt to changing specifications in materials
characterization (meaning density, as measured by its x-ray attenuation
coefficient), its mass, and its thickness. Our design uses a two-stage cascaded
approach, in which the first stage is characterized by a high recall rate over
the entire range of possibilities for the threat parameters that are allowed to
change. The purpose of the second stage is to then fine-tune the performance of
the overall system for the current threat specifications. The computational
effort for this fine-tuning for achieving a desired PD/PFA rate is far less
than what it would take to create a new classifier with the same overall
performance for the new set of threat specifications.
