Ground Penetrating Radar as a Contextual Sensor for Multi-Sensor Radiological Characterisation

Abstract

Radioactive sources exist in environments or contexts that influence how they are detected and localised. For instance, the context of a moving source is different from a stationary source because of the effects of motion. The need to incorporate this contextual information in the radiation detection and localisation process has necessitated the integration of radiological and contextual sensors. The benefits of the successful integration of both types of sensors is well known and widely reported in fields such as medical imaging. However, the integration of both types of sensors has also led to innovative solutions to challenges in characterising radioactive sources in non-medical applications. This paper presents a review of such recent applications. It also identifies that these applications mostly use visual sensors as contextual sensors for characterising radiation sources. However, visual sensors cannot retrieve contextual information about radioactive wastes located in opaque environments encountered at nuclear sites, e.g., underground contamination. Consequently, this paper also examines ground-penetrating radar (GPR) as a contextual sensor for characterising this category of wastes and proposes several ways of integrating data from GPR and radiological sensors. Finally, it demonstrates combined GPR and radiation imaging for three-dimensional localisation of contamination in underground pipes using radiation transport and GPR simulations.

A Novel Method for Remote Depth Estimation of Buried Radioactive Contamination

“…While a table of the densities of common materials can be prepared, such a solution does not take into account the changes the material may have undergone overtime due to environmental factors. Therefore, a better solution will be to integrate data from other non-intrusive techniques such as ground penetrating radar as proposed in [ 26 ]. This multisensor data fusion solution will enable real-time determination of the entraining material properties and also potentially improve the accuracy of the estimated depth.…”

State-of-the-Art Mobile Radiation Detection Systems for Different Scenarios

“…The main challenges and research encompass: Integration of contextual sensors based on ground-penetrating RADARs (GPR) in radiation imagers [ 229 ]—normally, the contextual sensors used to characterize the distribution of radiation sources are based on visual sensors. However, in decommissioning tasks, it is necessary to check the origin of the radiation deep inside materials, as is the case of contaminated pipelines which are underground or inside concrete, or the ingress of radioactive contaminants in concrete.…”

Integration of Ground- Penetrating Radar and Gamma-Ray Detectors for Nonintrusive Characterisation of Buried Radioactive Objects

“…Combining Equations (5) and (6) will yield Equation (10), which can be solved simultaneously with Equation (4) to estimate both the soil bulk density and the depth of the source. This integration of the data from the GPR and gamma detectors can be considered as a type of low-level multisensor data fusion where data from different sensors are combined using physical models to enable or improve the estimation of physical parameters [27]. 2dct1.3=()ρb−Wcρsϵs0.65+()1−ρb−Wcρs−Wcϵa0.65+Wcϵw0.65…”