3D technologies in safeguards applications

The Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty foresees improved verification of existing nuclear installations. To be effective new advanced capabilities must be developed and fielded to increase the accuracy of verification and detection of changes in the facilities. New systems need to be portable, simple to use and yet highly accurate and dependable. 3D laser technologies proved to be effective in Design Information Verification (DIV). IAEA has successfully used the system in Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant. The system allowed IAEA to carry out rapid and accurate DIVs far faster and more accurately than had been possible in the past. A typical example from a mockup area at the JRC is presented. A further application of 3D laser technologies is to perform the verification of the facility buildings. Typical plants are located on sites of few square kilometres with tens of buildings, housing process and storage facilities. This requires systems that are capable of measuring and verifying long distances and easy to handle in an outdoor environment. This paper presents an overview of the different 3D technologies and discusses its potential use in safeguards applications: - Design Information Verification. - 3D Surveillance (overcomes the flatten world of classical 2D Surveillance and provides accurate quantitative (i.e., distance) measurements. - Object self authentication (spatial forensics), including the verification of closure welds on containers. - Outdoor verification System or verification of the facility buildings and outdoor perimeters. For the verification of outdoor areas the paper presents a transportable system capable of acquiring on the fly 3D geometric data from a large installation. The proposed system is a scaled based approach combining different sensors and 3D reconstruction techniques depending on the size of the scene/objects to be modelled and accuracy of the final model. The system is mounted on a vehicle and integrates 3D laser scanners, high-resolution digital photography, video, GPS and inertial navigation systems. Data is acquired while driving the vehicle and/or from different static scanning positions. The system includes software tools for the automatic correction of the vehicle movements. In addition tools were specific developed to handle the huge amount of data collected to reconstruct large areas. It is possible in any time to redo a data acquisition from the same area without any assumptions of exact position, orientation or used scanner. Based on this new information it is possible to detect any changes in the buildings or any other type of modification. For a complete description of an outdoor scene, ground data acquired by the vehicle system can be combined with both airborne 3D laser data and/or satellite 3D data