Image Processing for Arms Control Monitoring at Nuclear Facilities

Arms control monitoring must provide confidence that weapons are being dismantled without compromising other ongoing activities or classified information. The All-Russian Research Institute of Automatics (VNIIA) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are collaborating toward joint development of model protocols and technology demonstrations for warhead arms control chain-of-custody monitoring. This effort is intended to move tasks beyond conceptual paper studies into the characterization, improvement, and optimization of hardware and software via demonstrations and evaluations to better understand the dynamic monitoring challenges. This will also provide a better understanding of joint U.S. and Russian interactions. Prototype demonstrations will provide a basis for dynamic monitoring of declared treaty activities, thus providing inspectors the confidence that these activities are taking place as declared. For example, the Integrated Facility Monitoring System (IFMS) prototype has successfully demonstrated the chain-of-custody monitoring during the dismantlement process within nuclear weapons disassembly plants. The objective of the initial bilateral collaboration is the modernization of existing video imaging systems for facility monitoring. The modernization shall enhance system capabilities for verification of authorized components and activities. Modernization of existing video imaging systems is being conducted in both hardware and software. In the hardware area, camera capabilities are being upgraded, and in the software area, modernization includes development of new, improved algorithms of change detection, image segmentation, object extraction, and heuristic tracking of objects. The significance of the work has two main aspects. First, improvements in image processing for nuclear facilities monitoring can lead to improved systems for safety, security, accounting and control for nuclear materials in U.S. and Russian facilities. Second, joint U.S.-Russian development of improved facility monitoring systems increases the likelihood that both nations would agree to allow the use of such systems to monitor the implementation of future bilateral or multilateral nuclear arms control agreements. Both these outcomes have clear arms control, nonproliferation, and national security benefits.