Abstract
Radioactive sources exist in environments or contexts that influence how they are detected and localised. For instance, the context of a moving source is different from a stationary source because of the effects of motion. The need to incorporate this contextual information in the radiation detection and localisation process has necessitated the integration of radiological and contextual sensors. The benefits of the successful integration of both types of sensors is well known and widely reported in fields such as medical imaging. However, the integration of both types of sensors has also led to innovative solutions to challenges in characterising radioactive sources in non-medical applications. This paper presents a review of such recent applications. It also identifies that these applications mostly use visual sensors as contextual sensors for characterising radiation sources. However, visual sensors cannot retrieve contextual information about radioactive wastes located in opaque environments encountered at nuclear sites, e.g., underground contamination. Consequently, this paper also examines ground-penetrating radar (GPR) as a contextual sensor for characterising this category of wastes and proposes several ways of integrating data from GPR and radiological sensors. Finally, it demonstrates combined GPR and radiation imaging for three-dimensional localisation of contamination in underground pipes using radiation transport and GPR simulations.
Highlights
The detection of ionising radiation is critical in fields such as medicine, security and monitoring and decommissioning of nuclear sites and facilities
The use of contextual sensors enabled the retrieval of additional contextual information about the radiation source, thereby enabling characterisation of radioactive sources in challenging scenarios
These applications are dominated by the use of visual sensors as contextual sensors
Summary
The detection of ionising radiation is critical in fields such as medicine, security and monitoring and decommissioning of nuclear sites and facilities. While every ionising radiation is associated with some level of hazard, highly penetrating neutron and gamma radiations are of particular interest This is because their high penetrability makes them be both harmful and beneficial; harmful because they pose significant dosage risks to both humans and materials even from far off distances and beneficial because they can be used to detect and image objects located in opaque environments, such as internal body organs [1], buried mines [2], etc. A wide range of radiological sensors [3,4,5,6] has been developed for stand-off non-destructive detection of both neutron and gamma radiations.
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