Long lines at airport security checkpoints are a familiar frustration for travelers. With limited staff, steadily rising passenger volume, and increasingly sophisticated security threats, airports face constant pressure to improve screening operations.

To address these challenges, many airports are adopting AI to automate X-ray image screening. However, when the accuracy of AI-based screening systems falls short, secondary inspection rates rise—often creating new bottlenecks that slow overall throughput.

So how can we improve the accuracy of AI-powered security screening? The answer lies in enabling AI to continuously learn new threats. At the center of that approach is Superb Platform’s Synthetic Data Generation technology.

The AI Dilemma: It Can’t Detect Threats It Has Never Seen

An AI model’s performance depends on both the quantity and quality of its training data. For airport security AI to accurately detect a wide range of prohibited items, it must be trained on a large volume of X-ray images that contain those items.

The challenge is that training data is desperately scarce for new types of threats or prohibited items disguised in novel ways. In the past, training AI on emerging threats often required an inefficient process: placing real threat items into bags and manually capturing X-ray images one by one. This approach is costly and time-consuming—and for items that are dangerous or difficult to obtain, acquiring data can be nearly impossible.

As a result, AI systems tend to detect only known categories of threats and hit a clear performance ceiling when faced with the latest risks.

Superb AI’s Answer 1: Creating X-ray Images From Text

To solve the data scarcity problem, Superb AI’s platform offers an innovative synthetic data generation capability—technology that produces high-quality synthetic data that closely resembles real-world images using only text descriptions.

For example, if a user enters a prompt such as:“An X-ray photo of a plastic basket containing a backpack with metal and electronics inside. Includes a knife, multiple small metal fragments, and plastic items,”the platform’s image generation model can instantly create X-ray images that match those conditions.

This approach has the following key benefits:

• Access to rare data: Generate unlimited X-ray data for rare and dangerous items—such as emerging weapons or explosives—that are difficult to obtain in the real world, and use it to train AI models.
• Rapid model updates: When a new threat emerges, immediately generate synthetic data for that threat and use it for retraining—enabling fast adaptation to changing conditions.
• Lower cost and faster development: Eliminate manual data collection by generating the data you need on demand—dramatically reducing the time and cost required to develop and improve AI systems.

Synthetic data is a key enabler for overcoming the limitations of conventional AI—where continuous retraining was impractical—and for building an automated, MLOps-based retraining loop.

Superb AI’s Answer 2: ZERO, a Vision Foundation Model That Detects Instantly Without Training

If synthetic data is the solution for continuous learning, Superb AI’s vision foundation model ZERO is the solution for instant response.

ZERO is an industry-tailored vision foundation model built on zero-shot technology, enabling it to detect new object types immediately—without additional retraining. Users can either describe what they want to find in text or upload a reference image, and ZERO will instantly identify the target object within the image.

This is particularly well suited to security screening environments, where teams must respond immediately to unexpected, newly emerging threats.

Moreover, combining ZERO with synthetic data generation can maximize performance. ZERO’s zero-shot capability enables an immediate first response to a new threat. At the same time, the synthetic data generation feature can produce large volumes of high-quality training data for that threat, enabling additional fine-tuning of AI models. This creates powerful synergy—delivering both fast response and long-term accuracy.

Toward a Smarter, Safer Future

AI-powered synthetic data generation and zero-shot detection represent more than incremental technical progress. They deliver practical value across the airport ecosystem: a faster and smoother passenger experience, reduced operational burden for security personnel so they can focus on higher-priority risks, and improved cost efficiency and flexibility for airport operators.

The future of airport security will not remain stuck in static systems. With Superb AI’s innovations, the industry is entering an era of AI security—systems that evolve, learn continuously, and detect even unseen threats.