A Semiempirical Transparency Model for Dual Energy Cargo Radiography Applications

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Hauptverfasser: Lalor, Peter, Danagoulian, Areg
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Lalor, Peter
Danagoulian, Areg
author_facet Lalor, Peter
Danagoulian, Areg
contents Cargo containers passing through ports are scanned by non-intrusive inspection systems to search for concealed illicit materials. By using two photon beams with different energy spectra, dual energy inspection systems are sensitive to both the area density and the atomic number of cargo contents. Most literature on the subject assumes a simple exponential attenuation model for photon intensity in which only free streaming photons are detected. However, this approximation neglects second order effects such as scattering, leading to a biased model and thus incorrect material predictions. This work studies the accuracy of the free streaming model by comparing it to simulation outputs, finding that the model shows poor atomic number reconstruction accuracy at high-$Z$ and suffers significantly if the source energy spectra and detector response function are not known exactly. To address these challenges, this work introduces a semiempirical transparency model which modifies the free streaming model by rescaling different components of the mass attenuation coefficient, allowing the model to capture secondary effects ignored by the free streaming model. The semiempirical model displays improvement agreement with simulated results at high-$Z$ and shows excellent extrapolation to materials and thicknesses which were not included during the calibration step. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that the semiempirical model yields accurate atomic number predictions even when the source spectra and detector response are not known exactly. Using the semiempirical model, manufacturers can perform a simple calibration to enable more precise $Z$ reconstruction capabilities, which has the potential to significantly improve the performance of existing radiographic systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_07131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Semiempirical Transparency Model for Dual Energy Cargo Radiography Applications
Lalor, Peter
Danagoulian, Areg
Instrumentation and Detectors
Cargo containers passing through ports are scanned by non-intrusive inspection systems to search for concealed illicit materials. By using two photon beams with different energy spectra, dual energy inspection systems are sensitive to both the area density and the atomic number of cargo contents. Most literature on the subject assumes a simple exponential attenuation model for photon intensity in which only free streaming photons are detected. However, this approximation neglects second order effects such as scattering, leading to a biased model and thus incorrect material predictions. This work studies the accuracy of the free streaming model by comparing it to simulation outputs, finding that the model shows poor atomic number reconstruction accuracy at high-$Z$ and suffers significantly if the source energy spectra and detector response function are not known exactly. To address these challenges, this work introduces a semiempirical transparency model which modifies the free streaming model by rescaling different components of the mass attenuation coefficient, allowing the model to capture secondary effects ignored by the free streaming model. The semiempirical model displays improvement agreement with simulated results at high-$Z$ and shows excellent extrapolation to materials and thicknesses which were not included during the calibration step. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that the semiempirical model yields accurate atomic number predictions even when the source spectra and detector response are not known exactly. Using the semiempirical model, manufacturers can perform a simple calibration to enable more precise $Z$ reconstruction capabilities, which has the potential to significantly improve the performance of existing radiographic systems.
title A Semiempirical Transparency Model for Dual Energy Cargo Radiography Applications
topic Instrumentation and Detectors
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07131