Development and Testing of an Aerial Radiation Detection System

This paper reports on the design and implementation of an airborne radiation detection system together with its associated signal processing and decision-making algorithms. This system is envisioned as the building block of an aerial radiation sensor network and it is specifically designed to detect weak radiological signatures in transit. The whole system is developed based on low-cost commercial off the shelf (COTS) components, and through a series of detailed experiments and Monte-Carlo tests, the paper shows how it can be deployed in time-critical application scenarios, where the time allocated to detect the source is limited. Performance metrics for the detection algorithms utilized in the system indicate that the reported technology can offer a significant improvement on the detection speeds compared to alternative techniques utilizing the same hardware resources.