Introducing a new radiation detection device calibration method and estimating 3d distance to radiation sources

Radiation detection devices; also known as particle detectors; are vastly used to track and identify radioactive sources within a given area. The 3D distance to such radioactive sources can be estimated using stereo radiation detection devices. In stereo vision, the devices have to be calibrated before they are used to acquire stereo images. In this work, we first introduce a new method to calibrate the stereo radiation detection devices using homography translation relationship. The radiation detection devices we have used in our approach are pinhole cameras. The calibrated pinhole cameras are then used to generate stereo images of radioactive sources using a pan/tilt device, and estimated the 3D distance using the intrinsic and extrinsic calibration data, and triangulation. Stereo vision cameras are used along with pinhole cameras to obtain coincident 2D visual information. We performed two experiments to estimate the 3D distance using different input image data sets. The inferred 3D distance results had around a 5~6% error which assures the accuracy of our proposed calibration method.