Fitting well into the narrative of Atmanirbhar Bharat, a home-grown technology firm, specialising in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based image processing, has supplied the first set of advanced dual-view X-ray scanners for use in airports.

Vehant Technologies, founded by two alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, has supplied and installed 10 dual-view X-ray baggage scanners at four Indian airports, including Kolkata, Patna and Udaipur. Such advanced baggage scanners are operational in many major airports across the world.

Dual view

“The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security last year notified that new X-ray scanners installed in airports should be dual-view machines. While, some foreign-make dual-view scanners are used on trial basis at some international airports in the country, ours was the first firm to bag orders from the Airport Authority of India and to install them at these four airports over the last four weeks,” said its co-founder and CEO, Kapil Bardeja.

Each of these scanners costs tens of lakhs of rupees and if all airports were to replace the traditional X-ray scanners with dual-view machines, the order would run into something like 1,500 machines as per conservative estimates.

Multi-dimensional view

As the name suggests, these machines offer views from two different angles – bottom and side – of luggage passing through the scanner. “It may sound simple, but the technology is complex as two sources of X-ray sitting side by side can create a lot of noise and interference. It is important to cancel these noises for a better screening,” said Bardeja, who along with Anoop G Prabhu, who is currently the firm’s CTO, incubated Vehant in IIT Delhi in 2005.

A dual-view scanner will be able to give a multi-dimensional view of the contents helping security personnel detect contraband objects.

Multiple applications

“We have been working on dual-view X-ray machines for nearly three years. And we have so far supplied 35 machines. Most of them to oil refineries,” said Bardeja.

Vehant Technologies, a medium scale enterprise with two plants in Greater Noida and Gagret in Himachal Pradesh, works in three major verticals – security, surveillance and traffic monitoring. The firm with 250 employees raked ₹65 crore in revenue in the last financial year.

The firm was recently in the news for developing ultra violet ray based baggage disinfectants together with Hyderabad-based International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials and IIT Bombay.