Nuclear radiation detection based on the convolutional neural network under public surveillance scenarios

Abstract

Nuclear energy is a clean and popular form of energy, but leakage and loss of nuclear material pose a threat to public safety. Radiation detection in public spaces is a key part of nuclear security. Common security cameras equipped with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors can help with radiation detection. Previous work with these cameras, however, required slow, complex frame-by-frame processing. Building on the previous work, we propose a nuclear radiation detection method using convolution neural networks (CNNs). This method detects nuclear radiation in changing images with much less computational complexity. Using actual video images captured in the presence of a common Tc-99m radioactive source, we construct training and testing sets. After training the CNN and processing our test set, the experimental results show the high performance and effectiveness of our method.