AI technologies for enhancing capabilities, greater efficiency and effectiveness for customs

forthcoming

EU customs authorities are a cornerstone in the international trade landscape, playing a critical role in preventing the entry of illegal goods, safeguarding revenue, & ensuring the seamless flow of goods. Balancing these responsibilities is particularly challenging in today’s environment, where the volume of global trade continues to expand rapidly. Mitigating the entrance of illegal goods is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with limited human resources. Aiming to address these challenges, the CustomAI consortium has united its expertise and competences to develop an AI-toolkit that will reduce the number of false positives (situations where the cargoes like shipping containers or parcels have been selected for inspection despite not containing contraband). The proposed AI-toolkit will revolutionise customs operations by involving non-intrusive and robust AI-enhanced technologies for predicting, detecting, and selecting high-risk cargoes for inspection. The VCCO concept is adopted for managing all processes in the customs control of artefacts (e.g. container, parcel). Key components of the AI toolkit include: * AI-based risk anticipation relying on AI-analysis of internal knowledge in compilation with external multilingual data, including manifest and declarations. Only relevant cargos will be sent for inspection. * AI-enhanced vapour-based detectors implied only on the containers selected in the previous step. * AI-based x-ray for threat detection in containers applied on output of step two (the human inspection takes place only after this step). * Multimodal LLM Continual Learning model, which will have as input, x-ray and camera images, and will be trained on threat dataset composed of threat samples (x-ray and visual images of threat parcels) updated by customs. * Blockchain technology for secure data sharing & supply chain traceability. By adopting these cutting-edge technologies, the CustomAI toolkit is set to revolutionise customs operations.