Experimental verification of evolutionary estimation algorithms for radioactive source localisation

Abstract

This paper considers localisation of point sources of gamma radiation using dose rate measurements. Binary and continuous genetic algorithms (GA) were used to implement maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of position and strength of point radiation sources. MLE was achieved by minimising the objective function which computes the negative log likelihood. Real experimental data collected during a DSTO-conducted field trial were used to test and verify the performance of the algorithms. The performance of GA-based implementation was compared to an implementation that uses MATLAB built-in routine fminsearch. Source parameters estimated by the algorithms were also compared to the theoretical boun..