Detection and parameter estimation of radioactive sources with mobile sensor networks

Detecting the presence of illicit radioactive sources in large urban areas is critical in national security applications. The concept of mobile radiation sensor networks has been proposed to solve this problem. For mobile sensor network, it is important to develop efficient approaches to estimate the location and activity of potential radioactive sources. In this paper, kernel density estimation (KDE) and grid search are applied with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to estimate the source location and intensity. Simulation study and experiment are conducted to compare the effectiveness of the proposed methods.