Mobile Object Tracking in Panoramic Video and LiDAR for Radiological Source-Object Attribution and Improved Source Detection

The addition of contextual sensors to mobile radiation sensors provides valuable information about radiological source encounters that can assist in adjudication of alarms. This study explores how computer-vision based object detection and tracking analyses can be used to augment radiological data from a mobile detector system. We study how contextual information (streaming video and LiDAR) can be used to associate dynamic pedestrians or vehicles with radiological alarms to enhance both situational awareness and detection sensitivity. Possible source encounters were staged in a mock urban environment where participants included pedestrians and vehicles moving in the vicinity of an intersection. Data was collected with a vehicle equipped with 6 NaI(Tl) 2 inch times 4 inch times 16 inch detectors in a hexagonal arrangement and multiple cameras, LiDARs, and an IMU. Physics-based models that describe the expected count rates from tracked objects are used to correlate vehicle and/or pedestrian trajectories to measured count-rate data through the use of Poisson maximum likelihood estimation and to discern between source-carrying and non-source-carrying objects. In this work, we demonstrate the capabilities of our source-object attribution approach as applied to a mobile detection system in the presence of moving sources to improve both detection sensitivity and situational awareness in a mock urban environment.