Smoothing gamma ray spectra to improve outlier detection

Rapid detection of radioisotopes in gamma-ray data can, in some situations, be an important security concern. The task of designing an automated system for this purpose is complex due to, amongst other factors, the noisy nature of the data. The method described herein consists of preprocessing the data by applying a smoothing method tailored to gamma ray spectra, hoping that this should decrease their variance. Given that the number of counts at a given energy level in a spectrum should follow a Poisson distribution, smoothing may allow us to estimate the true photon arrival rate. Our experiments suggest that the added data preprocessing step can have large impact on the performance of anomaly detection algorithms on this particular domain.