Fast radiation mapping and multiple source localization using topographic contour map and incremental density estimation

Toward a global picture of the radiation exposure of an area, particularly for fast emergency response, a UAV based exploration method is proposed. Without a priori knowledge of the radiation field, it is difficult to select the region of interest (ROI) which includes all radiation sources. For the case of a single radiation source, a greedy algorithm may localize the source by finding the maximum radiation value. However, when multiple sources generate a hotspot in a cumulative manner, the hotspot position does not coincide with one of the source positions. Therefore, we propose an efficient exploration method to quickly localize the radiation sources using the following procedures: (1) ROI selection using topographic maps with specific radiation level selection methods and (2) source localization estimating the number of sources and their positions with incremental variational Bayes inference of Gaussian mixtures. Under three different conditions according to the number of sources and their positions, we have shown that the proposed model can reduce the ROI and significantly improve the estimation accuracy than existing methods.