Distributed Detection of a Nuclear Radioactive Source using Fusion of Correlated Decisions

Distributed Detection of a uclear Radioactive Source using Fusion of Correlated Decisions Ashok Sundaresan and Pramod K. Varshney Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Syracuse University Syracuse, U.S.A. Email: asundare,varshney@syr.edu ageswara S.V. Rao Computer Science and Mathematics Division Oak Ridge ational Laboratory Oak Ridge, U.S.A. Email: raons@ornl.gov Abstract A distributed detection method is developed for the detection of a nuclear radioactive source using a small number of radiation counters. Local one bit decisions are made at each sensor over a period of time and a fusion center makes the global decision. A novel test for the fusion of correlated decisions is derived using the theory of copulas and optimal sensor thresholds are obtained using the ormal copula function. The performance of the derived fusion rule is compared with that of the Chair-Varshney rule. An increase in detection performance is observed. A method to estimate the correlation between the sensor observations using only the vector of sensor decisions is also proposed. I. ITRODUCTIO Detection of radiation from nuclear materials has become an important task due to the increasing threats from potential terrorist activities. One possible scenario is the dispersion of radioactive material using a conventional explosive device, namely the so called dirty bomb, in a densely populated area. The radioactive materials used in creating a dirty bomb are usually isotopes like Cs-137 that are widely used in industries and in hospitals for medical purposes and can be obtained with considerable ease. The radioactive materials for clandestine activities will need to be transported to the destination place. The task is to detect the low level radiations from the vehicles carrying these sources before they reach their destination. We propose a system comprising of a network of radiation counters operating collaboratively to detect the presence of a radioactive source. Such a network of sensors could be deployed at suitable places along the road side or at places like weigh stations, inspection stations, etc. Detection of radioactive sources using sensor networks has received some attention off-late. In [1], the authors examine the increase in signal-to-noise ratio obtained by a simple combination of data from networked sensors compared to a single sensor. The costs and benefits of using a network of radiation detectors for radioactive source detection are analyzed and evaluated in [2]. In [3], the authors propose a Bayesian methodology by assuming independence of sensor observations. While this work is rigorous, the independence property is not satisfied in practice since the sensor measurements are correlated based on the relative sensor locations and with respect to the source. In this work, we propose a novel distributed framework for radiation source detection and exploit the correlation of sensor observations for improved detection performance. Due to the nature of the problem, the radioactive sensors used are expensive high precision devices requiring more battery power unlike low cost, low power sensors used in most sensor network applications [4]. This makes deployment of a large number of sensors infeasible. In this work, we assume the presence of a few sensors (typically ranging from 1-5 monitoring a region for the possible presence of a radiation source, and propose a distributed bandwidth-constrained scheme for radioactive source detection. The sensors provide radiation counts based on the intensity of the radiation, and a decision regarding the presence or absence of a radioactive source may be made based on a local threshold. The radiation counts typically follow a Poisson distribution with the parameter proportional to inverse square distance [5]. Thus, sensors that are closer to the source register higher counts compared to farther ones, and such a relationship makes the measurements correlated, and hence non-independent. But the individual sensor measurements that correspond to the margins of the joint measurement distribution are fairly well known for this problem [6]. However, in general the correlations are not a priori known and must be explicitly accounted for in combining the information from multiple sensors. The radiation source or target to be detected is assumed to be stationary over a period of time. A sequence of binary decisions (over a length of time are made at the individual sensors and sent to a fusion center which combines them to make a final decision on the presence or absence of the radioactive source. As noted previously, if a radioactive source is indeed present, the sensor decisions at any instant of time would be correlated since all sensors observe a common random phenomenon. Fusion of correlated decisions has been studied in [7], [8]. These approaches assumed a complete knowledge of the joint distribution of the sensor observations. Such methods are feasible in special cases such as when sensor observations are realizations of multivariate Gaussian random variables. We present a novel approach using copulas to fuse correlated decisions and obtain optimal thresholds for sensor quantization. Using the copula theory, joint distribution functions can be constructed from the marginal distributions even when the observations are correlated non-gaussian random

variables. Hence the fusion strategy described in this paper is particularly attractive in practical cases where the underlying distributions are non-gaussian. The rest of the paper is arranged as follows. The problem is described in Section II. The design of the optimal fusion rule and individual sensor tests is considered in Section III. Experimental results are shown in Section IV. Some concluding remarks are drawn in Section V. II. PROBLEM FORMULATIO The problem is formulated as a binary hypothesis testing problem with the H 0 hypothesis indicating the absence of any radioactive source and the H 1 hypothesis indicating the presence of a radioactive source. The observations received by the sensors under both hypotheses are as follows. H 0 : z ij = b ij + w ij H 1 : z ij = c ij + b ij + w ij i = 1, 2; j = 1,..., i = 1, 2; j = 1,..., where b ij, c ij and w ij are the background radiation count, source radiation count and measurement noise respectively, at sensor i located at (x i, y i during the j th time interval. The background radiation count received during the time interval (0, t] is assumed to be Poisson distributed with known rate λ b. The source radiation count at sensor i located at (x i, y i is assumed to be Poisson distributed with rate λ ci. We assume an isotropic behavior of radiation in the presence of the source so that the rate λ ci is a function of the source intensity A, and distance of the i th sensor from the source given by λ ci = (1 A (x 0 x i 2 + (y 0 y i 2 (2 where (x 0, y 0 represent the source coordinates. The measurement noise w ij is Gaussian distributed with a known variance w. 2 The background radiation count b ij and measurement noise w ij are assumed to be spatially and temporally independent. This implies that under the H 0 hypothesis, sensor observations are independent over space and time. Under the H 1 hypothesis, the sensors observe a spatio-temporal phenomenon giving rise to spatial and temporal correlation. The overall problem is solved in a distributed fashion. It consists of determining individual sensor thresholds to form sensor decisions and the fusion test to declare the global decision using the vector of sensor decisions. In this work, we assume temporal independence and while designing the system, focus on exploiting only spatial correlation between the sensors for improved detection performance. Also, in this paper, the problem is solved for a known signal case, i.e., values of source intensity A and source coordinates (x 0, y 0 are assumed to be known. A. Decision Fusion III. SYSTEM DESIG For the sake of simplicity, in this paper we will assume that two sensors are observing the common phenomenon over time intervals each of length (0, t] (see Figure 1. Let us Fig. 1. A two sensor distributed detection scheme assume that τ 1 and τ 2 are individual sensor thresholds used for making the one-bit decisions. Then the sensor decisions, at any time interval 1 i, are quantized versions of sensor observations defined as { 0 if < z 1i τ 1, u 1i = Q(z 1i = (3 1 if τ 1 z 1i < { 0 if < z 2i < τ 2, u 2i = Q(z 2i = (4 1 if τ 2 < z 2i < Also let P r(u 1i = 1 H 1 = p 1, P r(u 1i = 1 H 0 = q 1 P r(u 2i = 1 H 1 = p 2, P r(u 2i = 1 H 0 = q 2 If f(z 1i H 1 and f(z 1i H 0 are the conditional density functions (under H 1 and H 0 respectively of the i th observation received at sensor 1 (z 1i, then it can be readily seen that p 1 = q 1 = τ 1 τ 1 f(z 1i H 1 dz 1i f(z 1i H 0 dz 1i We can define p 2 and q 2 in a similar manner. Under H 0, the observation received by any sensor during a particular time interval i, 1 i is given by z i = b i + w i where the sensor subscript has been omitted for notational convenience. It is obvious that z i follows the hierarchical

distribution [9] z i (b i, 2 w b i P oisson(λ b Hence under H 0, the marginal probability density function (pdf of z i is given by f(z i = f(b = k b, z i = = k b =0 f(z i b = k b P (b = k b k b =0 k b =0 [ ] 1 exp (z i k b 2 exp( λ b λ k b b 2π 2 w 2w 2 k b! From the above equation it is obvious that f(z i is an infinite sum of scaled Gaussian densities. Hence f(z i under H 0 is a Gaussian mixture distribution with the following mean and variance. E(z i = E(E(z i b = E(b = λ b var(z i = E(var(z i b + var(e(z i b = 2 w + λ b ote that the Gaussian mixture has its components centered around the Poisson counts and weighted by the Poisson count probabilities. Components centered around count values close to the Poisson rate λ b are more heavily weighted. In this paper, we approximate the Gaussian mixture distribution by a Gaussian distribution with the same mean and the variance. Similar approximations have been employed in the literature [10]. Thus, f(z i H 0 (λ b, w 2 + λ b Similarly, under the H 1 hypothesis, f(z i H 1 (λ b + λ c, 2 w + λ b + λ c where λ c is a function of the sensor s position relative to the source and hence may be different for sensor 1 and sensor 2. Once the pdfs of individual sensor s observations under both hypotheses are known, we can readily evaluate ( τ1 λ b λ c1 p 1 = Q (5 2 w + λ b + λ c1 ( τ2 λ b λ c2 p 2 = Q 2 w + λ b + λ c2 ( τ1 λ b q 1 = Q 2 w + λ b ( τ2 λ b q 2 = Q 2 w + λ b where, Q(. is the complementary cumulative distribution function of the standard ormal. Let u 1 and u 2 be the vector of sensor decisions, then the optimal test at the fusion center is the likelihood ratio test (LRT given by [11] (6 (7 (8 Λ(u = P (u 1, u 2 H 1 P (u 1, u 2 H 0 H 1 H 0 γ (9 Assuming temporal independence of sensor decisions, the optimal fusion statistic becomes T (u = P (u 1i, u 2i H 1 P (u (10 1i, u 2i H 0 Let P (u 1i = 0, u 2i = 0 H 1 = P 00, P (u 1i = 0, u 2i = 1 H 1 = P 01 P (u 1i = 1, u 2i = 0 H 1 = P 10, P (u 1i = 1, u 2i = 1 H 1 = P 11 P (u 1i = 0, u 2i = 0 H 0 = Q 00, P (u 1i = 0, u 2i = 1 H 0 = Q 01 P (u 1i = 1, u 2i = 0 H 0 = Q 10, P (u 1i = 1, u 2i = 1 H 0 = Q 11 Then the joint probability mass function (pmf of u 1 and u 2 under H 1 and H 0 is given by P (u 1i, u 2i H 1 = P (1 u1i(1 u2i 00 P (1 u1iu2i 01 P u1i(1 u2i 10 P u1iu2i 11 (11 P (u 1i, u 2i H 0 = Q (1 u1i(1 u2i 00 Q (1 u1iu2i 01 Q u1i(1 u2i 10 Q u1iu2i 11 (12 Using Eq. (11 and Eq. (12 in Eq. (10, taking log on both sides and simplifying, we get log Λ(u = C 1 where, u 1i + C 2 u 2i + C 3 u 1i u 2i (13 C 1 = log P 10Q 00 P 00 Q 10 C 2 = log P 01Q 00 P 00 Q 01 C 3 = log P 00P 11 Q 01 Q 10 P 01 P 10 Q 00 Q 11 It is known that u 1i, u 2i and u 3i = u 1i u 2i are each Bernoulli random variables. The success probabilities of u 1i and u 2i are p 1 and p 2 respectively under H 1 and q 1 and q 2 respectively under H 0. Let the success probability of u 3i be p 3 = P 11 under H 1 and q 3 = Q 11 under H 0. Under the assumption of time independence, u 1i, u 2i and u 3i are each Binomial distributed. Using Laplace-DeMoivre approximation [12], the optimal fusion test statistic is Gaussian distributed under both hypotheses. Let µ 1 and 2 1 be the mean and the variance of log Λ(u under H 1 and µ 0 and 2 0 be the mean and the variance of log Λ(u under H 0. Then it can be shown that µ 0 = [C 1 q 1 + C 2 q 2 + C 3 q 3 ] (14 2 0 = [C 2 1q 1 (1 q 1 + C 2 2q 2 (1 q 2 + C 2 3q 3 (1 q 3 ] (15 µ 1 = [C 1 p 1 + C 2 p 2 + C 3 p 3 ] (16 2 1 = [C 2 1q 1 (1 q 1 + C 2 2q 2 (1 q 2 + C 2 3q 3 (1 q 3 ] (17

The system probability of false alarm (P F A and system probability of detection (P D are now given by ( γ µ 1 P D = Q 1 ( γ µ 0 P F A = Q 0 (18 (19 where, γ is the threshold for the fusion test. Under the eyman-pearson criterion, γ can be obtained by constraining P F A = α as below γ = 0 Q 1 (P F A + µ 0 (20 For performing the test at the fusion center, we require the quantities P 00, P 01, P 10, P 11, Q 00, Q 01, Q 10, Q 11 that completely specify the joint conditional pmfs of the sensor decisions u 1i and u 2i under both hypotheses. Because of the independence of sensor observations and hence sensor decisions under H 0, we get Q 00 = (1 q 1 (1 q 2 Q 01 = (1 q 1 q 2 Q 10 = q 1 (1 q 2 Q 11 = q 1 q 2 However, under H 1, the observations are correlated and the joint pmf of the sensor decisions cannot be evaluated in a straightforward manner. Under H 1, the probabilities P 00, P 01, P 10, P 11 need to be calculated as follows. P 00 = τ 1 τ 2 z 1i= z 2i= P 01 = P 10 = P 11 = τ 1 z 1i= z 1i=τ 1 z 2i= z 1i=τ 1 f(z 1i, z 2i H 1 dz 1i dz 2i (21 z 2i=τ 2 f(z 1i, z 2i H 1 dz 1i dz 2i (22 τ 2 f(z 1i, z 2i H 1 dz 1i dz 2i (23 z 2i=τ 2 f(z 1i, z 2i H 1 dz 1i dz 2i (24 otice that the joint distribution of the sensor observations under H 1 (f(z 1i, z 2i H 1 is required to calculate the probabilities P 00, P 01, P 10, P 11. It is known that the marginals f(z 1i H 1 and f(z 2i H 1 are Gaussian. However, a conclusion about the joint density of z 1i and z 2i under H 1 cannot be made directly since z 1i and z 2i do not originate from a bi-variate Gaussian distribution. Here we employ the copula theory to construct the joint distribution of z 1i and z 2i under the H 1 hypothesis. B. Copula Theory Recently a lot of progress has been made in the study of copulas and their applications in statistics. Copulas are basically functions that join or couple multivariate distribution functions to their one-dimensional marginal distribution functions [13]. Another definition of copulas states that they are joint distribution functions of uniform distributed random variables. The role of copulas in relating multivariate distribution functions and their univariate marginals is explained by Sklar s theorem [13], [14], which is stated as follows. Sklar s Theorem: Consider an m-dimensional continuous distribution function F with continuous marginal distribution functions F 1,..., F m. Then there exists a unique copula C, such that for all x 1,..., x m in [, ] F (x 1, x 2,..., x m = C(F 1 (x 1, F 2 (x 2,..., F m (x m (25 Conversely, consider a copula C and univariate cdfs F 1,..., F m, then F as defined in Eq.(25 is a multivariate cdf with marginals F 1,..., F m. As a direct consequence of the above theorem,we obtain by differentiating both sides of Eq.(25, ( m f(x 1,..., x m = f(x i c(f 1 (x 1,..., F m (x m (26 where, c is termed as the copula density given by c(k = m (C(k 1,..., k m k 1,..., k m (27 where, k i = F i (x i. Thus, we can construct a joint density function with specified marginal densities by employing Eq.(26. The choice of a copula function to construct the joint density is an important consideration here. Various families of copula functions exist in the literature [13], [14]. However, it is not very clear as to which copula function should be used in which case. It is conjectured by many authors that the use of different copula functions may exhibit different dependence behavior among the random variables. In this work, we make use of the ormal (or Gaussian copula to construct the joint density function of the sensor observations under the H 1 hypothesis. The use of other copula functions is under investigation. The copula density for a ormal copula can be obtained easily from Eq.(26 as below. c(φ(x 1,..., φ(x m = Φ(x 1,..., x m φ(x 1,..., φ(x m (28 where, Φ is the multivariate ormal density function and φ is the univariate normal density function. The ormal copula incorporates the dependencies among the random variables in a manner exactly similar to the way a multivariate ormal distribution does by using the covariance matrix. Hence, to use the ormal copula in constructing a joint distribution, the linear correlation coefficients between the random variables are needed. In some cases, the correlation between the random

variables may be available in advance or evaluated from a correlation model. Otherwise, they need to be estimated from the data. This will be elucidated in more detail in Section IV. Making use of the ormal copula density(see Eq.(28 to construct the joint distribution of the sensor observations under H 1, we get f(z 1i, z 2i H 1 =f(z 1i H 1 f(z 2i H 1 c g (F Z1i H 1 (z 1i, F Z2i H 1 (z 2i (29 where, c g (u, v is the ormal copula density evaluated from Eq.(28. On simplifying Eq.(29, f(z 1i, z 2i H 1 is found to be nothing but the bi-variate Gaussian density as expected. It is important to note here that the use of a different copula function would not have resulted in the bi-variate Gaussian density but might have still served our purpose of determining the joint probabilities. Using the determined joint density function of the observations under H 1, expressions for the probabilities P 00, P 01, P 10, P 11 can be obtained by using Eqs.(21-(24. C. Optimal Threshold for Local Sensors In Section III-A, we assumed that τ 1 and τ 2 are individual sensor thresholds. It can be seen that P D and P F A given by Eq.(18 and Eq.(19 are functions of τ 1 and τ 2. Constraining P F A = α, P D can be written as P D (τ 1, τ 2 = Q( 0(τ 1, τ 2 Q 1 (α + µ 0 (τ 1, τ 2 µ 1 (τ 1, τ 2 1 (τ 1, τ 2 (30 The sensor thresholds are chosen to maximize P D at a particular value of P F A. Hence the optimal sensor thresholds are given by (τ 1, τ 2 = arg max τ 1,τ 2 P D (τ 1, τ 2 (31 For the results shown in this paper, a search algorithm is used to perform the above optimization. IV. EXPERIMETAL IVESTIGATIOS As mentioned previously, in this work we present results for the case when the count rate of the source at each sensor (λ ci is known. The count rate is determined by using the following source parameter values: A = 10, (x 0, y 0 = (10, 10. It is assumed that both sensors are located equidistant from the source at a distance 4 units from the source resulting in equal values of λ ci (λ c1 = λ c2 = λ c = 0.625. A mean background radiation with count λ B = 10 and measurement noise with variance 2 w = 10 is considered. It is assumed that the sensors are observing the phenomena over = 100 time intervals each of length one second. A. Known Correlation Case In this case, we assume that the correlation between the random variables z 1i and z 2i is known. Spatial correlation functions modeling the correlation between two sensors as a function of the distance between them exist in literature [15] and may be used in this case. Starting from bi-variate ormal, bi-variate Poisson random variables with mean equal to λ c are generated (using the probability integral transform and then applying the inverse Poisson distribution function with varying values of correlation (ρ s. Due to the effect of background radiation and measurement noise, the correlation between the sensor observations (ρ z at any time instant i is reduced and is given by ρ s λ c ρ z = λ c + λ b + w 2 (32 For each value of ρ s and consequently ρ z, the expression for P D as a function of τ 1 and τ 2 by constraining the value of P F A is obtained from Eq.(30 and the same is maximized w.r.t τ 1 and τ 2 to obtain the optimal sensor thresholds. The maximum value of P D is noted. The same is repeated for various values of P F A and the ROC is generated. The experiment is repeated for different values of ρ s and the results are plotted as shown in Figure 2. For comparison purposes, we also evaluated the detection performance of the system that assumes independence of sensor decisions under the H 1 hypothesis. Under the conditional independence assumption, the term C 3 in Eq.(13 becomes zero and the optimal test statistic reduces to log Λ 2 (u = C 1 u 1i + C 2 u 2i (33 which is nothing but the Chair-Varshney test statistic [16]. Also, the joint probabilities of the sensor decisions under the H 1 hypothesis are now given by, P 00 = (1 p 1 (1 p 2 P 01 = (1 p 1 p 2 P 10 = p 1 (1 p 2 P 11 = p 1 p 2 Using the Laplace-DeMoivre approximation [12], the Chair- Varshney test statistic is also Gaussian distributed (assuming time independence whose mean and variance under either hypothesis can be calculated from Eqs.(14-(17 by substituting C 3 = 0. P D and P F A for the Chair-Varshney statistic, as functions of τ 1 and τ 2, are obtained and the detection performance of the Chair-Varshney statistic is also evaluated in the same manner as described afore (see Figure 2. From Figure 2, it is clear that the detection performance is improved by taking correlation into account. The proposed approach is able to do much better than the Chair-Varshney fusion rule even at low values of correlation. The increase in P D is noticeable especially at lower values of P F A which is desirable. As expected, the detection performance increases with increase in signal correlation. B. Unknown Correlation Case In this case, the correlation between z 1 and z 2 needs to be estimated first before the pdf of the test statistic given by Eq.(13 can be evaluated under either hypotheses. A two step procedure is adopted here and is described as follows.

Fig. 2. Detection Performance for Known Correlation Case First the sensor thresholds are obtained by assuming the sensor decisions to be independent under H 1 and using the Chair-Varshney test statistic as detailed in the previous section. The dependence between the sensor observations is evaluated (estimated from the decision vectors (u 1 and u 2 using a nonparametric rank correlation measure, Kendall s τ [13]. Given a vector (a, b of observations from a bi-variate random vector (A, B, Kendall s τ is defined ([13] as the ratio of the difference in the number of concordant pairs (c and discordant pairs (d to the total number of pairs of observations, i.e., k τ = c d c + d (34 (a i, b i and (a j, b j are said to be concordant if (a i a j (b i b j > 0 and discordant if (a i a j (b i b j < 0. An interesting property of the Kendall s τ correlation measure is that it remains invariant under non-decreasing transformations of the original data. Because of this property and from Eq.(3 and Eq.(4 we can infer that Kendall s τ between u 1 and u 2 is equal to that between z 1 and z 2. Once Kendall s τ (k τ between z 1 and z 2 is known, the linear correlation coefficient between z 1 and z 2 is given by [14] ( πkτ ρ(z 1, z 2 = sin (35 2 In the second step, using the correlation estimated in the first step the pdf of the optimal test statistic (see Eq.(13 is obtained under both hypotheses. The same procedure described in Section IV-A is then carried out to determine optimum sensor thresholds that maximize P D at a given value of P F A. The results of our simulation are shown in Table 1. The results are shown for the case when A = 10, λ c1 = λ c2 = 0.625, λ B = 10 and w 2 = 10. The correlation between the source signal received at the two sensors ρ s = 0.9. A degradation in performance is noticeable compared to the known signal case. This is expected since the correlation is being estimated from a sequence of quantized data. However, the use of correlation still has increased the detection performance compared to the Chair-Varshney test especially for low P F a values. ote that the length of time over which decisions are obtained plays an important role here. The longer the observation time better will the estimate of the correlation between the sensor observations. V. COCLUSIO A distributed scheme using a network of two sensors for detection of a nuclear radioactive source was developed. A new fusion test taking correlation of sensor decisions was developed and used to determine optimal sensor quantization thresholds. The performance of the proposed scheme was compared to the Chair-Varshney test which assumes conditional independence of sensor decisions. The proposed scheme is able to achieve a better detection performance than the Chair- Varshney fusion rule. Our future work will consist of investigating methods to estimate the covariance matrix of the ormal copula function by utilizing training data obtained by generating a set of measurements under both hypotheses. In our case, these measurements can be generated in two different ways: a Poisson and Gaussian distributions can be used to generate c ij, b ij and w ij, which will be added to provide z ij as in Eq. (1, or b the intensity level λ ci can be computed based on the source parameters, and radiation sensors can be simultaneously subjected to radiation levels λ ci and λ b in a controlled laboratory environment. The output of the sensors can taken as random samples of (z 1, z 2. In future work, we will also consider the use of other copula functions to construct the joint density of sensor observations. Also, a more general detection problem in the event of unknown source location parameters will be considered.

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