Visual Search in Airport-Security Screening

Security screening is a special visual search process. The quality of the airport-security screeners directly determines the safety of the passengers, and understanding is the premise of improvement, so, it is necessary to learn the visual search details in security screening. Two groups of subjects (screeners’ group and students’ group) were selected to conduct a screening simulation experiment, to test the rationality of the current security principle (from difficult to easy, from complex to simple) and the difference between the two groups. Tobii T120 eye tracker was used to record the eye movements in the process and some parameters were selected to characterize eye movements. The data visually showed that screeners’ accuracy rate was 28.7% higher than students’, and screeners’ experiment time was shorter on average. Moreover, the accuracy of the judgment increases were produced by changes of observers’ experience on airport-security screening, not by changes of the number of the fixation point, and there were significant differences on fixation time percent, saccade distance, judgment accuracy between the two groups. The screeners tended to examine the images systematically according to the principle of screening but the students group preferred to random searching.