Material discrimination in cosmic muon imaging using Pattern Recognition Method

This work reports numerical simulations and statistical tests carried out to study the performance of a prototype imaging setup to be developed for material discrimination using Muon Scattering Tomography (MST). The reconstructed images have been processed with a Pattern Recognition Method (PRM) to discriminate the low-Z and high-Z materials. The same method has been applied to examine the performance of the setup in recognizing the shape of the test objects. Design parameters of the setup, such as, area of the muon detectors, their physical placement, along with detector performance (spatial resolution, etc.) have been discussed. To evaluate the efficacy of the newly proposed PRM, the results have been compared to another technique based on cluster finding.