Video imaging for Nuclear Safeguards

The field of Nuclear Safeguards has received increasing amounts of public attention since the events of the Iraq-UN conflict over Kuwait, the dismantlement of the former Soviet Union, and more recently, the North Korean resistance to nuclear facility inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The role of nuclear safeguards in these and other events relating to the world`s nuclear material inventory is to assure safekeeping of these materials and to verify the inventory and usage of these materials as reported by states that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Nuclear Safeguards are measures prescribed by domestic and international regulatory bodies and implemented by the nuclear facility or the regulatory body. These measures include destructive and nondestructive analysis of product materials and process by-products for materials control and accountancy purposes, physical protection for domestic safeguards, and containment and surveillance for international safeguards. In this presentation we will introduce digital video image processing and analysis systems that have been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for application to the nuclear safeguards problem. Of specific interest to this audience is the detector-activated predictive wavelet transform image coding used to reduce drastically the data storage requirements for these unattended, remote safeguards systems.