Firefighters found a dead woman entangled in machinery Thursday in a non-public baggage-processing area at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.
Larry Langford, a spokesperson for the Chicago Fire Department, said firefighters were called to the airport around 7:45 a.m. for a report of a person pinned in machinery used to move baggage. He said they discovered the woman entangled in a conveyer belt system in a baggage room.
Police said she was 57 years old but have not released her name.
The baggage room wasn’t publicly accessible, Langford said, and it’s not clear how she found her way into it. Scott Allen, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Labor, said an official with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration visited the scene and learned the woman was not an airport employee.
I mean. It’s not magic. Even I could run a basic computer vision system from a raspberry pi and a webcam. They could easily come up with a system that returns confidence percentages for bags vs humans. Assuming the baggage isn’t coming in too warm, they could have an IR thermal camera that stops the line if it detects any temperature over a certain threshold. They could also use other tests, like two pictures a few seconds apart to see if something is moving on its own on the belt. I’m sure there are even more tests than the ones above, let alone design changes that could disincentivize folks doing dumb stuff, or making their dumb stuff easier to spot - like putting the end of the return conveyer behind plexiglass, so the person is visible on the conveyer before they disappear into the wall.
All of the above are not 100% solutions, but taken together, they can establish a reasonable confidence level they’re not about to intake something that isn’t a bag.