Affiliation:
1. Engineering Dept, Nuclear Research Center, Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority, Inshas, Egypt
Abstract
Radioactive materials are extremely dangerous as it threatens the earth survival. They contaminate the environment with a lot of damages. Nowadays revealing radioactive material become an important topic for public health, national security, and environmental services. This paper discusses a statistical method to detect and identify an unobserved radioactive source, where the counts of radiation particles received by those detectors are spatially distributed of Poisson distribution. Also, each count composed of a signal and a background. This paper provides a numerical method to estimate the strength and location of unobserved radioactive source based on the physical law of signal degradation with distance. Based on these estimates, a likelihood ratio statistic is used to test the existence of the source. Simulation results show that the proposed statistical method is efficient for revealing the unobserved radioactive source