Picture comparison binarization method for cosmic ray muon radiography

Cosmic ray muon radiography has become a hot topic among people recently for its great preponderance to detect high-Z materials. Picture comparison is a key point of this technique. Currently, normalized mean absolute distance measure (NMADM) is one of the most useful methods for picture comparison. However, aimed at contraband detection, under the limitations of muon amount and unknown path, through the numerical simulations that we use NMADM to quantitatively evaluate the distribution of the nuclear material reconstructed by the MLSD-OSEM algorithm which we proposed in 2007, we found NMADM is not available for cosmic ray muon radiography. In this paper, we proposed to develop NMADM into a NMADM based on the binarized images, that is, picture comparison binarization method (PCBM). Numerical simulations demonstrate PCBM is a more reasonable picture comparison method for cosmic ray muon radiography. Believed this work will play a significant role for cosmic ray muon radiography into our real life.