Maximum Likelihood Localization of Radioactive Sources Against a Highly Fluctuating Background

Er-wei Bai; Alexander Heifetz; Paul Raptis; Soura Dasgupta; Raghuraman Mudumbai

doi:10.1109/TNS.2015.2497327

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Maximum Likelihood Localization of Radioactive Sources Against a Highly Fluctuating Background

Er-wei Bai, Alexander Heifetz, Paul Raptis, Soura Dasgupta and Raghuraman Mudumbai

IEEE transactions on nuclear science, Vol.62(6), pp.3274-3282

12/2015

DOI: 10.1109/TNS.2015.2497327

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Abstract

This paper considers the use of maximum likelihood estimation to localize a stationary source from total gamma ray counts, in an open area setting with a highly fluctuating background. As this turns out to be a highly nonconcave maximization, convergence rates of global convergent algorithms, such as simulated annealing, can be very slow and iterative algorithms such an Newton's method for maximization can be captured by local maxima while fast. Thus, the selection of the initial estimate is critical to how well they perform. This paper proposes a way to generate such an initial estimate using an averaging process that is shown to be asymptotically convergent to the maximum likelihood source estimate. This ensures that with a sufficiently large number of samples, the initial estimate is indeed within of the basin of attraction of such iterative algorithms. Analytical results are supported by numerical simulations based on a measured background data and synthetically injected source data.

Maximum likelihood estimation

Parameter estimation

Gamma-ray detection

Simulated annealing

Numerical simulation

Iterative methods

Gamma ray detection

Details

Title: Subtitle: Maximum Likelihood Localization of Radioactive Sources Against a Highly Fluctuating Background
Creators: Er-wei Bai - Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
Alexander Heifetz - Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
Paul Raptis - Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
Soura Dasgupta - Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
Raghuraman Mudumbai - Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: IEEE transactions on nuclear science, Vol.62(6), pp.3274-3282
Publisher: IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/TNS.2015.2497327
ISSN: 0018-9499
eISSN: 1558-1578
Grant note: DE-FG52-09NA29364 / DoE; Department of Energy EPS-1101284; ECCS-1150801; CNS-1239509 / NSF; National Science Foundation
Language: English
Date published: 12/2015
Academic Unit: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Record Identifier: 9984083249802771

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