Distributed detection of a nuclear radioactive source using fusion of correlated decisions

A distributed detection method is developed for the detection of a nuclear radioactive source using a small number of radiation counters. Local one bit decisions are made at each sensor over a period of time and a fusion center makes the global decision. A novel test for the fusion of correlated decisions is derived using the theory of copulas and optimal sensor thresholds are obtained using the Normal copula function. The performance of the derived fusion rule is compared with that of the Chair-Varshney rule. An increase in detection performance is observed. A method to estimate the correlation between the sensor observations using only the vector of sensor decisions is also proposed.