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Title: Improving robustness for model discerning synthesis process of uranium oxide with unsupervised domain adaptation

Journal Article · · Frontiers in Nuclear Engineering
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [4]
  1. Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States); Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
  2. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States); Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States)
  3. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
  4. Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States)

The quantitative characterization of surface structures captured in scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images has proven to be effective for discerning provenance of an unknown nuclear material. Recently, many works have taken advantage of the powerful performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to provide faster and more consistent characterization of surface structures. However, one inherent limitation of CNNs is their degradation in performance when encountering discrepancy between training and test datasets, which limits their use widely. The common discrepancy in an SEM image dataset occurs at low-level image information due to user-bias in selecting acquisition parameters and microscopes from different manufacturers. Therefore, in this study, we present a domain adaptation framework to improve robustness of CNNs against the discrepancy in low-level image information. Furthermore, our proposed approach makes use of only unlabeled test samples to adapt a pretrained model, which is more suitable for nuclear forensics application for which obtaining both training and test datasets simultaneously is a challenge due to data sensitivity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed approach effectively improves the performance of a model by at least 18% when encountering domain discrepancy, and can be deployed in many CNN architectures.

Research Organization:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation; US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-76RL01830; 2015-DN-077-ARI092
OSTI ID:
2203354
Report Number(s):
PNNL-SA-176828
Journal Information:
Frontiers in Nuclear Engineering, Vol. 2; ISSN 2813-3412
Publisher:
Frontiers Media S.A.Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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