Construction of a developed software for nuclear forensics of micro particles

ABSTRACT Nuclear forensics has capabilities to implement the national nuclear security infrastructures as well as the usage in the illicit trafficking of radioactive and nuclear materials. One of the forensic analysis methods that is widely spread is scanning electron microscope (SEM), which provides images of a sample by scanning its surface with an optimized electron. In this study, a large number of images that represent all steps of magnifications that range from x30 to x300000 were used in addition to the SEM data of uranyl nitrate hexahydrate samples and two uranium ores to develop an SEM image manipulation software. The constructed software aims at image processing of micro particles to matlab that supplies a comprehensive collection of reference-standard algorithms for processing images, analyzing, visualizing and algorithm development. The developed software (SEMMICRO001) can produce a wide range of image treatments such as enhancing image, noise removal or reduction, geometry transformations, image statistics and displaying image. It can also help us to obtain more information for small particles in micro scale especially particles size in the analyzed samples. Graphical abstrac