Digital pulse processing algorithm for neutron and gamma rays discrimination

Abstract

This paper presents a proposed algorithm for discriminating neutron and gamma radiation events. In the proposed algorithm, discriminating features are extracted from the input radiation event. These features are extracted using charge integration, matched filtering, and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) methods. The extracted features are then fed into the discriminator which is an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) discriminator or a Support Vector Machine (SVM) discriminator. The obtained results prove that the proposed algorithms can be used efficiently for the neutron and gamma ray discrimination purpose and that the DWT based method achieves the highest discrimination rates. For discriminators, the SVM discriminator achieves better performance with a slightly shorter processing time compared to the ANN discriminator.