A source-attractor approach to network detection of radiation sources

Conference · Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2016

OSTI ID:1327702

Wu, Qishi ^[1]; Barry, M. L. ^[2]; Grieme, M. ^[2]; Sen, Satyabrata ^[3]; Rao, Nageswara S ^[3]; Brooks, Richard R ^[4]

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1. University of Memphis
2. New Jersey Institute of Technology
3. ORNL
4. Clemson University

Radiation source detection using a network of detectors is an active field of research for homeland security and defense applications. We propose Source-attractor Radiation Detection (SRD) method to aggregate measurements from a network of detectors for radiation source detection. SRD method models a potential radiation source as a magnet -like attractor that pulls in pre-computed virtual points from the detector locations. A detection decision is made if a sufficient level of attraction, quantified by the increase in the clustering of the shifted virtual points, is observed. Compared with traditional methods, SRD has the following advantages: i) it does not require an accurate estimate of the source location from limited and noise-corrupted sensor readings, unlike the localizationbased methods, and ii) its virtual point shifting and clustering calculation involve simple arithmetic operations based on the number of detectors, avoiding the high computational complexity of grid-based likelihood estimation methods. We evaluate its detection performance using canonical datasets from Domestic Nuclear Detection Office s (DNDO) Intelligence Radiation Sensors Systems (IRSS) tests. SRD achieves both lower false alarm rate and false negative rate compared to three existing algorithms for network source detection.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1327702
• Resource Relation: Conference: IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems, Badem Baden, Germany, 20160919, 20160921
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English