X-ray measurement model and information-theoretic metric incorporating material variability with spatial and energy correlations

Abstract

Extending our prior work, we propose an X-ray measurement model that incorporates spatial-correlated material variability. The model enables more accurate task-specific assessment of the performance of X-ray imaging and sensing systems. More specifically, the model can be used to calculate bounds on the probability of error (P-e) for threat-detection tasks. We analyze the performance of a prototypical X-ray measurement system to compare the new spatial- and energy-correlated model with the previous model, which ignores the spatial correlation.