Abstract
Nuclear security is a critical concept for public health, counter-terrorism efforts, and national security. Nuclear radioactive materials should be monitored and secured in near real-time to reduce potential danger of malicious usage. However, several challenges have arose to detect the anomalous radioactive source in a large geographical area. Radiation naturally occurs in the environment. Therefore, a non-zero level of radiation will always exist with or without an anomalous radioactive source present. Additionally, radiation data contain high levels of uncertainty, meaning that the measured radiation value is significantly affected by the velocity of the detector and background noise. In this article, we propose an innovative approach to detect anomalous radiation source using mobile sensor networks combined with a Poisson kriging technique. We validate our results using several experiments with simulated radioactive sources. As results, the accuracy of the model is extremely high when the source intensity is high or the anomalous source is close enough to the detector.
Highlights
Nuclear weapons, bombs, as well as radiological dispersal devices are threats to national security and human health
Using the background radiation data collected in the morning as shown in Fig 1, a series of discrete estimates of semi-variogram values are obtained, an exponential model (Eq 17) can be fitted
The data streams that are collected through continuous interaction between time and space require real-time analytics and response
Summary
Bombs, as well as radiological dispersal devices are threats to national security and human health. A non-zero level of radiation will always exist, which presents the problem of detecting a radioactive source with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The radiation source is the anomalous radiation signal and the background radiation is the noise. The GPS location of the detector is only accurate within 1 to 3 meters, and the measured radiation value is significantly affected by the velocity of the detector, background noise, shielding materials, weather. Nuclear radiation can be measured by various detectors, which are in integer format (counts per second, or cps). The measured radiation count rate is assumed to follow the Poisson distribution [27]. Variable s is equal to zero when there are no radioactive sources present, and it is mainly influenced by the shielding materials and distance between the actual source and detector. When the time interval considered is not long, b can be assumed to be constant around location r
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