Field trial of a highly portable coded aperture gamma ray and 3D imaging system

Given the growing concerns surrounding declared and undeclared nuclear activities around the world, a novel multi-modal imaging system combining gamma imaging, visible-light imaging, and multi-resolution 3D imaging has been developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). As part of an international collaborative effort, this research aims at providing a portable imaging system to assess, monitor and/or detect nuclear material dispersion in nuclear facilities. This novel imaging system includes (1) a coded-aperture gamma-ray imager that provides a map of all major radiological sources present in the field-of-view and (2) a low-resolution stereo system to retrieve high-level 3D scene information. Using a unique approach to combine the data a 3D model of the scene can be rendered with the gamma information as a projected texture, therefore allowing easy visualization of the location of all detected radiological sources. In this paper, we give a summary of this research by first presenting the instruments, then by detailing our approach to project gamma information on the high-resolution 3D point-cloud, and presenting the results of the first field trial of the system.