Enhanced Effective Detection of Buried Radioactive Waste - 10177

In our previous paper, we presented a matched filtering (MF)-based approach to detect buried radioactive waste using its gamma-ray spectrum. This approach does not require background information and its performance is robust under very low-count conditions. In this paper, we improve this approach when background information is available. The spectral comparison ratio (SCR) method is adopted to normalize the background contribution in energy spectra, and the MF operator is applied on the SCR-transformed data. The resulting SCR MF approach can improve the performance of MF. It can also outperform other widely used techniques, such as energy window and gross count.