A transportation security system, having a set of screening node devices located at one or more airports, each having image capturing equipment deployed thereat by which image data are generated, the image data comprising individual images of objects passing through the image capturing equipment; a set of image interpretation node devices at which it is determined whether a security threat is depicted in the image data generated at the screening node devices; and a multiplexing control node having a processor coupled to memory and configured to assign an image, from the image data generated by the set of screening nodes, to an image interpretation node of the set of image interpretation nodes for analysis, a method, and a transportation security apparatus related thereto.

A compositional visualization system comprises a sensor to collect contextual information, a particle generator to generate a first stream of one or more types of particles, and a detector to receive a second stream of one or more detectable products. The second stream is generated by interaction of the first stream with the environment. The system further comprises computer-executable instructions to cause the system to transform the received second stream into compositional data, and merge the compositional data with the contextual information to generate a merged digital representation. The merged digital representation can be displayed at one or more devices and can also be used directly to drive autonomous robotic systems.