DetectionX-ray vision: Bomb technicians strengthen their hand with Sandia’s XTK software

Published 19 September 2016

X-Ray Toolkit (XTK), an image-processing and analysis software developed at Sandia National Laboratories, has been adopted by the military and emergency response communities in the United States and around he world. “XTK is the standard in the field not only nationally, but internationally. It made the average bomb tech a better bomb tech,” said Craig Greene, a special agent and bomb technician at the Albuquerque, New Mexico FBI. “In the past twenty years, the bomb technician community has progressed from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century in terms of equipment and procedures, and XTK is a major part of that progression.”

In the chaos that followed the terrorist attack at the 2013 Boston Marathon, bomb squads scanned packages at the scene for explosive devices. Two homemade pressure cooker bombs had killed three people and injured more than 250, and techs quickly had to determine if more were waiting to blow up.

They got help from X-Ray Toolkit (XTK), an image-processing and analysis software developed at Sandia National Laboratories that has swept the ranks of the country’s bomb squads. Sandia Lab says that, in fact, XTK has spread through the military and emergency response communities so rapidly that it is now in the hands of more than 20,000 users across the globe. It also was adopted by the FBI’s Hazardous Devices School, which certifies the 467 recognized state and local bomb squads in the U.S., as its benchmark for all courses.

XTK is the standard in the field not only nationally, but internationally. It made the average bomb tech a better bomb tech,” said Craig Greene, a special agent and bomb technician at the Albuquerque FBI. “In the past twenty years, the bomb technician community has progressed from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century in terms of equipment and procedures, and XTK is a major part of that progression.”

The toolkit got to the people who needed it so quickly due to a thoroughly unconventional approach to technology transfer. “The objective was to get the technology out so it could be used to save lives,” said Justin Garretson, lead developer of the XTK software.

Sandia recently won the 2016 national Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer for its XTK effort. Licensing specialist Bob Westervelt said Sandia did three things:

  • offered it to military and law enforcement bomb squads to download free from the XTK website;
  • offered no-cost test and evaluation licenses to X-ray scanner manufacturers so they could make sure XTK worked with their hardware; and
  • offered low-cost licenses to companies willing to give high-quality training to end users.

“Those were foundational elements of the XTK licensing. It was a unique approach,” Westervelt said. “We hadn’t done anything like it on that scale before.”