Conference Proceedings
On-belt analysis of minerals using naturally occurring gamma radiation
B Moran, D Huynh, M Edwards, A Harris, X Wang, B La Scala
ICASSP IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings | IEEE | Published : 2008
Abstract
We describe a method to analyze materials on a conveyor belt using natural gamma spectra collected with a BGO (Bismuth Germanate) gamma ray detector, which collects emissions from Potassium (K), Uranium (U), and Thorium (Th) in the materials. A statistical model is proposed based on a Poisson process and an approximate maximum likelihood (ML) technique via the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is then used to estimate the amount of each of the three elements in the material. A refinement of the statistical model is used to estimate linear drift in the detector. ©2008 IEEE.