The improved surveillance of radioactive sources used in hospitals, research centers, food irradiations plants and other fully legal and sanctioned industries is paramount to interrupt the terrorism value chain. This value chain relies on stealing radioactive sources from the legitimate before mentioned institutions to build radiological dispersal devices (RRD). Nowadays, radioactive sources are supervised using video cameras and sensor networks that signal the presence of radioactivity. The complexity of these systems grows exponentially as a function of the number of sensors in these networks. Moreover, the sensitivity, identification, and localization limitations and the relative ease of tampering of these systems impose a severe risk to the security of radioactive sources used today in the homeland and in other countries. Our approach, if shown to be practical and effective, will result in a surveillance system with the following
Benefits: 1) Ability to provide real-time localization of the radioactive sources in a laboratory with a spatial resolution of a few centimeters; 2) Ability to simultaneously reject scattered background and uptake from other natural sources; 3) Ability to interface with current installed surveillance infrastructure to augment overall system performance; and 4)ability to inventory the sources under surveillance. The proposed system can also interface with databases used to keep track of the sources in the institution.
