Anomaly Detection in Radiation Sensor Data With Application to Transportation Security

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new approach for detecting trucks transporting illicit radioactive materials using radiation data. The approach is motivated by the high number of false alarms that typically results when using radiation portal monitors. Our approach is a three-stage anomaly detection process that consists of transforming the radiation sensor data into wavelet coefficients, representing the transformed data in binary form, and detecting anomalies among data sets using a proximity-based method. The approach is evaluated using simulated radiation data, and the results are encouraging. From a transportation security perspective, our results indicate that the concomitant use of gross count and spectroscopy radiation data improves identification of trucks transporting illicit radioactive materials. The results also suggest that the use of additional heterogeneous data with radiation data may enhance the reliability of the detection process. Further testing with real radiation data and mixture of cargo is needed to fully validate the results.