Patent ID: 7303132

Claim:
An x-ray object scanning-tunnel system for automatically acquiring and linking object identity and attribute information about each object transported through said x-ray object scanning-tunnel system while bearing a bar code symbol and/or identifying graphical indicia on the exterior surface thereof, said x-ray object scanning-tunnel system comprising: a scanning-tunnel housing having an input port and an output port, through which one or more objects can be transported; a planar light illumination (PLIIM) based subsystem, integrated within said scanning-tunnel housing, and including a pair of planar light illumination arrays (PLIAs) for producing a planar light illumination beam (PLIB) for illuminating the exterior surface of each object and the bar code symbol thereon as said object is transported through said scanning-tunnel housing, a linear image formation and detection (IFD) module for automatically forming and detecting digital linear images of the bar code symbol thereon, as said object is transported through said scanning-tunnel housing, and an image processing computer for buffering and processing said digital linear images of said object so to construct a two-dimensional (2D) image of the bar code symbol and/or graphical indicia on said object, and processing said 2-D image so as to read said bar code symbol, and identify said object by producing object identity information; an x-ray scanning subsystem mounted within said scanning-tunnel housing, for producing an x-radiation energy beam for scanning the interior and/or contents of each object transported through said scanning-tunnel housing, and automatically producing x-radiation images of said interior and/or contents; and an information linking computer subsystem programmed for automatically linking (i) x-radiation images of the interior and/or contents of each said transported object produced by said x-ray scanning subsystem, with (ii) object identification information produced by said PLIIM-based subsystem, for storage within a relational database management system (RDBMS) for subsequent access and retrieval.