BYU research advances a technology to monitor nuclear production.

Statistics professor Candace Berrett (right) developed a new method to detect and describe materials in each pixel of an infrared photograph. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration funded the project through a grant awarded to BYU engineering professor Gustavious Williams (left).For most people, infrared technology calls to mind soldiers with night-vision goggles or energy audits that identify where heat escapes from homes during the winter season.







Identification of materials would be straightforward if those were the only signals bouncing back at the camera. But other incoming signals, such as the object’s temperature and the weather conditions, muddle the analysis and add noise to the material’s light signature.

The novelty of the BYU study is that it directly separates the incoming signals to provide the material’s unique signature. Other methods deal with the noise by matching the combined signals in a database.

“What we wanted to know is if you didn’t know anything about the material in an image, and we had a  number of pictures over time, could we let the algorithms figure out what the different materials are and separate them out,” Williams said.

The resulting information is more akin to measuring the material with a spectrometer in a lab. Berrett’s model can also group together pixels that are related to each other to map out the various materials in an image.

“If we apply this model we can get distributions on the physical characteristics of each of these pixels and, using those different characterizations, also cluster the pixels with like materials,” Berrett said.

As the technique develops, this could do much more than spot a bomb-making plant. Imagine taking an infrared picture from above a city struck by an earthquake or tornado.

In addition to spotting all the gas leaks, it could reveal the exact gases being leaked and their concentrations in different neighborhoods.

“There are already instruments that can do this,” Williams said. “Our algorithms take a different approach but are still at a basic research stage. There are lots of places this research could go.”

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