Fast radiographic image reconstruction of moving object through gamma ray detection using FPGA

Container transport is the major way of freight transportation. In order to assure the safe freight transportation and examine the cargo container non-intrusively for contrabands, the radiation detection technology has been utilized more during last decade. One of the challenging issues in the non-intrusive scanning technology is to improve the scanning speed which can improve the allowable speed of the target. This paper proposes implementation of fast non-intrusive scanning scheme through gamma ray detection using network of 40 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) modules. The proposed system is implemented using four Spartan2, 50k gates (FPGA) modules. A real time radiographic image of container is obtained on computer screen, clearly showing the density of the contents of container. Each FPGA module acquires the 16 channel data simultaneously with sampling rate of 52 kilo sample per second (KSPS). The proposed speed of the target is limited to maximum of 46 m/min.