since 2001
In a perfect world, our bodies and belongings wouldn’t have to be scrutinized at slow-moving security checkpoints every time we travel or go to a concert.
Alas, because of smugglers and terrorists in our imperfect world, everyone needs to be checked.
An AI-based automatic threat-detection technology developed by Israeli company SeeTrue is now making the process faster and more accurate at over 100 checkpoints in about 10 countries.
“In 2024, we’ve stopped around 3 million prohibited items from getting aboard planes and into venues,” says SeeTrue cofounder and CEO Assaf Frenkel.
Of course, a bunch of those prohibited items were benign things like water bottles. However, SeeTrue’s technology – which connects seamlessly to existing X-ray and CT baggage-scanning systems – has also alerted inspectors to plenty of dangerous and smuggled goods.
“With the SeeTrue AI technology, we have observed higher passenger throughputs and streamlined the security screening process,” said Miltos Miltiadous, COO of Hermes Airports in Cyprus.
Hermes Airports estimates that SeeTrue has improved overall security efficiency by approximately 15 percent and enhanced passenger convenience as fewer travelers need to remove items from their luggage for further inspection.
“We’re not only increasing security by detecting more things but we’re also helping passengers by making lines move faster,” Frenkel tells ISRAEL21c.
Frenkel showed me video footage of an airport security worker turning off the camera on her screen as a certain bag is passing through.
SeeTrue’s system, operating alongside the darkened screen, identified contraband gold in the suitcase, sounding an alarm that alerted a nearby officer. Both the would-be smuggler and the security worker, who was his accomplice, were arrested.
The realization that airport personnel could be in cahoots with travelers is what put the idea behind SeeTrue into the head of founder Avihood Ben-Ari. But he shelved it for a couple of years because the problem of internal threats was too difficult to solve with traditional technology.
In 2018, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the founding team reconsidered his idea. They discovered that although “insider threats” were still an issue, there are additional challenges to tackle.
The much bigger pain point was long security lines and the corollary problems of staff burnout and false positive alerts that slow everything down.
“There is a detection problem and it’s very labor intensive and expensive,” says Frenkel.
“This is where AI can shine, replacing detail-centric jobs that are hard for people to do well consistently.”
X-ray scans see 3D items in 2D, making it difficult to distinguish, for example, a zipper from a bullet.
SeeTrue’s AI-advanced algorithms reliably determine if an object is suspicious, even when it’s altered or disassembled.
Frenkel explains that AI learns from sample data and extrapolates decisions based on the data it has been shown.
With myriad types of weapons and other prohibited objects out there, hidden in a huge variety of bags and parcels, “you cannot train the system on all the samples, so you need to have very robust algorithms to do a good extrapolation.”
This is where SeeTrue has been found to outperform competitors, Frenkel says.
“Our technology is developed to look for items in a chaotic environment. We have proprietary technology that proved itself in any product comparison we participated in, getting top results.”
Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, the second largest airport in the United States, selected SeeTrue’s technology to streamline and enhance the screening of thousands of workers coming through staff entrances to the airport each day.
“They care about their employee experience and want their daily entry to be seamless while providing maximum security,” says Frenkel.
Recently, the US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate’s Transportation Security Laboratory demonstrated SeeTrue’s AI technology in coordination with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Innovation Task Force at the Innovation Checkpoint in Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas; The solution was integrated with a Computed Tomography (CT) scanner to automatically detect prohibited items.
While the majority of SeeTrue’s customers are airports or seaports, more than a third of the company’s implementations are in urban venues such as mass transit stations (including nearly all Israel Railways stations), stadiums, malls, shipment facilities and courthouses.
The privately held company is headquartered in Tel Aviv and has offices in the US, UK and Amsterdam, altogether employing about 80 people. Among its investors are private investors and Jerusalem-based OurCrowd.
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