# Taming Generative Synthetic Data for X-ray Prohibited Item Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15299 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15299/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [GeoDiffusion: Text-Prompted Geometric Control for Object Detection Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04607/) (2023)
- [Improving the Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs: A Consistency Term and Its Dual Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01541/) (2018)
- [X-Paste: Revisiting Scalable Copy-Paste for Instance Segmentation using CLIP and StableDiffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03863/) (2022)
- [Occluded Prohibited Items Detection: an X-ray Security Inspection Benchmark and De-occlusion Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08656/) (2020)
- [DetDiffusion: Synergizing Generative and Perceptive Models for Enhanced Data Generation and Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13304/) (2024)
- [Towards Real-world X-ray Security Inspection: A High-Quality Benchmark and Lateral Inhibition Module for Prohibited Items Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09917/) (2021)
- [DALL-E for Detection: Language-driven Compositional Image Synthesis for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09592/) (2022)
- [PIDray: A Large-scale X-ray Benchmark for Real-World Prohibited Item Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10763/) (2022)
- [The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Evaluating Convolutional Neural Networks for Prohibited Item Detection Using Real and Synthetically Composited X-ray Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11508/) (2019)
- [Operationalizing Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Prohibited Object Detection in X-Ray Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04906/) (2021)
- [On the impact of using X-ray energy response imagery for object detection via Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12505/) (2021)
- [I2OL-Net: Intra-Inter Objectness Learning Network for Point-Supervised X-Ray Prohibited Item Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03811/) (2024)
- [Joint Sub-component Level Segmentation and Classification for Anomaly Detection within Dual-Energy X-Ray Security Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16453/) (2022)
- [Augmentation Matters: A Mix-Paste Method for X-Ray Prohibited Item Detection under Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01733/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training prohibited item detection models requires a large amount of X-ray security images, but collecting and annotating these images is time-consuming and laborious. To address data insufficiency, X-ray security image synthesis methods composite images to scale up datasets. However, previous methods primarily follow a two-stage pipeline, where they implement labor-intensive foreground extraction in the first stage and then composite images in the second stage. Such a pipeline introduces inevitable extra labor cost and is not efficient. In this paper, we propose a one-stage X-ray security image synthesis pipeline (Xsyn) based on text-to-image generation, which incorporates two effective strategies to improve the usability of synthetic images. The Cross-Attention Refinement (CAR) strategy leverages the cross-attention map from the diffusion model to refine the bounding box annotation. The Background Occlusion Modeling (BOM) strategy explicitly models background occlusion in the latent space to enhance imaging complexity. To the best of our knowledge, compared with previous methods, Xsyn is the first to achieve high-quality X-ray security image synthesis without extra labor cost. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms all previous methods with 1.2% mAP improvement, and the synthetic images generated by our method are beneficial to improve prohibited item detection performance across various X-ray security datasets and detectors. Code is available at https://github.com/pILLOW-1/Xsyn/.