Abstract: The present invention is directed to a method, system, and article of manufacture of a processing pipeline with caching at one or more internal stages for altering processing steps, useful for handling responsive inspection and analysis of high energy security images. A set of particular steps useful for data, image, and X-ray analysis are presented. Several nonlinear processing pipeline architectures comprised of particular useful arrangements of processing steps and features are described: an architecture for conducting radiographic image inspections, an architecture for inspecting/analyzing multiple related imaging modalities (such as X-ray digital radiography (DR) and material discrimination (MD)) in a unified manner, and an architecture for reconstructing computed tomography (CT) X-ray images. In addition, graphical user interface (GUI) facets are described which map to pipeline parameters to control the processing steps and arrangements responsively and intuitively.