Solving Inverse Detection Problems Using Passive Radiation Signatures [Slides]

Abstract

The ability to reconstruct an unknown radioactive object based on its passive gamma-ray and neutron signatures is very important in homeland security applications. Often in the analysis of unknown radioactive objects, for simplicity or speed or because there is no other information, they are modeled as spherically symmetric regardless of their actual geometry. In these presentation we discuss the accuracy and implications of this approximation for decay gamma rays and for neutron-induced gamma rays. We discuss an extension of spherical raytracing (for uncollided fluxes) that allows it to be used when the exterior shielding is flat or cylindrical. We revisit some early results in boundary perturbation theory, showing that the Roussopolos estimate is the correct one to use when the quantity of interest is the flux or leakage on the boundary. We apply boundary perturbation theory to problems in which spherically symmetric systems are perturbed in asymmetric nonspherical ways. We apply mesh adaptive direct search (MADS) algorithms to object reconstructions. We present a benchmark test set that may be used to quantitatively evaluate inverse detection methods.