Remote measurement of low-energy radiation based on ARM board and ZigBee wireless communication

Abstract

We propose a system for remote measurement of low-energy radiation, which is implemented using an ARM board and a ZigBee module. The ARM STM32F103 board employs a horizontal and vertical moving CMOS camera for front-end data acquisition. The camera can detect radiation over different coordinates given by latitude and longitude in a determined area. For image processing, we used the subtraction–summation algorithm based on gradient multiplication and edge detection. Compared to algorithms such as the max grayscale value, subtraction–summation, and whole summation, the improved subtraction–summation algorithm filters noise and removes the background grayscale value of the whole image to attain higher accuracy, stronger anti-interference ability, and better consistency to determine the radiation dose. We dedicated one port of the transmission module to send data through the STM32F103 board, whereas another port is connected to the ZigBee module for data reception. By employing this architecture, we achieved low power consumption and fast response in the remote data transmission. Overall, the proposed system performs the remote measurement of low-energy radiation with stability and reliability, which is required for critical scenarios such as the remote detection of nuclear radiation.