skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: The Modeled Performance of the ORNL Matched Filter Detector for Seismic Signatures of Multi-Axle Tractor Trailers

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1825400· OSTI ID:1825400
ORCiD logo [1];  [2];  [2]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  2. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

The MINOS program seeks methods to passively monitor the transfer of special materials, which are reproducible and quantitatively defensible. To date, we have demonstrated that short-period seismometers deployed near vehicle tracks can detect and monitor signatures of multi-axle tractor trailers impacting small road obstacles as means to detect and identify some transfer activities. In this report, we model the seismic velocity signal output from a tractor-trailer impacting a small obstacle (a template waveform) to parameterize a matched filter that identifies signals with similar shapes buried in noise, and that indicate repeating events (target waveforms). We then use this model to perform thousands of synthetic experiments, in which we apply our detector to identify noisy waveforms output from a similarly modeled vehicle data set; we process all data in the same manner as we process real data collected from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) seismic network. Our experiments, while limited, reveal that the matched filter shows a high discrimination capability, and at very low SNR values (at visibility thresholds). This means that template waveforms can match target waveforms that are sourced by models that share the same vehicle speed (target vehicles), and have a low probability of mis-identification. In particular, a matched filter designed to detect a five-axle tractor-trailer will reliably identify that target vehicle down to an SNR of 11.25 dB, and within ±0.1 km/hr, while successfully screening target vehicles with three axles.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
DOE Contract Number:
89233218CNA000001
OSTI ID:
1825400
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-21-30105
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English