Localization and tracking in known large environments using portable real-time 3D sensors

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The potential of open source information in supporting Acquisition Pathway Analysis to design IAEA State Level Approaches

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards designed to deter nuclear proliferation are constantly evolving to respond to new challenges. Within its State Level Concept, the IAEA envisions an objective-based and information-driven approach for designing and implementing State Level Approaches (SLAs), using all available measures to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of safeguards. The main Objectives of a SLA are a) to detect undeclared nuclear material or activities in the State, b) to detect undeclared production or processing of nuclear materials in declared facilities or locations outside facilities (LOFs), c) to detect diversion of declared nuclear material in declared facilities or LOFs. Under the SLA, States will be differentiated based upon objective State-Specific Factors that influence the design, planning, conduct and evaluation of safeguards activities. Proposed categories of factors include both technical and legal aspects, spanning from the deployed fuel cycle and the related state's technical capability to the type of safeguards agreements in force and the IAEA experience in implementing safeguards in that state. To design a SLA, the IAEA foresees the use of Acquisition Path Analysis (APA) to identify the plausible routes for acquiring weapons-usable material and to assess their safeguards significance. In order to achieve this goal, APA will have to identify possible acquisition paths, characterize them and eventually prioritise them. This paper will provide an overview of how the use of open source information (here loosely defined as any type of non-classified or proprietary information and including, but not limited to, media sources, government and non-governmental reports and analyses, commercial data, satellite imagery, scientific/technical literature, trade data) can support this activity in the various aspects of a typical APA approach.JRC.E.8-Nuclear securit

Sensor Tracking and Mapping (STeAM)

STeAM (Sensor Tracking and Mapping) is a software suite developed at the JRC, which is used to operate its Mobile Laser Scanning Platform (MLSP) and to process the scan data acquired by the system. MLSP/STeAM are used by nuclear safeguards inspectors during on-site inspections and it is commercially available for non-nuclear applications through a JRC license agreement. This report provides an overview of the STeAM software and the new features introduced in STeAM 2.3.3.JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit

GIS based Integration and Analysis of multiple source Information for Non-Proliferation Studies

In recent years the volume and variety of information that needs to be analysed in the context of non-proliferation have been increasing continuously Therefore, an integrated, all-source information analysis is paramount for an efficient and effective monitoring of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The ¿Treaty Monitoring¿ workpackage of the LIMES research project addressed this issue by developing an integrated platform supporting the non-proliferation image analyst in verifying treaty compliance. The main benefits of the platform are (i) integrating information from multiple sources and time-frames, including satellite imagery, site models, open source information, reports, etc; (ii) improved information management using a GIS-based platform and (iii) enhanced methodologies for satellite image analysis. The platform components facilitate the analysis by highlighting changes and anomalies, which are potentially safeguards-relevant and by providing quantitative measurements which are not readily available from the images. It improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the information assessment by providing all-source integration capabilities, which allow to easily access supporting collateral information (e.g. Open Source information) from an image analysis task, an vice versa. The paper presents the components of the integration platform and the results of the demonstration which monitored the construction of a nuclear reactor in Olkiluoto, Finland.JRC.E.9-Nuclear security (Ispra

Evaluating the Accuracy of Indoor Localization Devices

Indoor localisation in GPS-denied areas is a subject that currently receives a lot of attention in research and industry. There are many potential applications for indoor localization based on small and affordable consumer devices. It is however often difficult to evaluate the localization accuracy due to the unavailability of accurate ground-truth information. Over the last years, JRC has developed the Mobile Laser Scanning Platform (MLSP) for 3D mapping and indoor localization, which has been demonstrated to be significantly more accurate than what can be achieved with other (consumer) technologies. Since 2014, Microsoft has organized an Indoor Localization Competition which brings together players from research and industry to evaluate the current state of the art in indoor localization. JRC participated in the 2015 edition and won the first prize using the MLSP. In the following years, JRC co-organised the event and was responsible for evaluating the accuracy of the competing devices. In 2018, the evaluation was based on the average distance between the positions reported by the devices and the ground-truth trajectory generated by MLSP. This note describes the evaluation process and the activities that JRC carried out in preparation and during the event.  JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit

Containment and Surveillance Systems – reflections on future technologies

Euratom Safeguards is busy implementing the Next Generation Surveillance System (NGSS) in the field currently, close to 700 units are to be installed in the next years. This paper deals with the time after NGSS. It is time to design the technology that follows, to discuss the requirements for containment and surveillance systems in a broader sense, to study the very volatile general technical environment and select options for further development. With the growth of the security markets, with the advent of autonomously driving cars, with increasing threats in cybersecurity, with the appearance of more intelligent, smart sensors using various physical technologies beyond optical vision, opportunities can be envisaged and analysed for applicability. This may allow more efficient and effective safeguards implementation, and ideally, could contribute to an opening of the market and help reducing cost. At the same time, a growing number of facilities particularly at the back end of the fuel cycle turn static and new facility types appear. These pose their own challenges and may call for revised inspection approaches utilizing non image based sensors.JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit

XML Related Data Exchange from the Test Machine to a Web-Enabled MAT-DB

One of the JRC Petten tasks is to support European Research and Development (R&D) projects in the material and energy related areas with the management and dissemination of research results. By using XML technology test data can be entered directly from the test machines into the Web-enabled 'Materials Database' (Mat-DB), which is an integral part of the On-line Data Information Network (ODIN On-line Data Information Network, 2004) that has been developed at JRC Petten. Test data, which are kept in XML format and sent by R&D project partners via the World Wide Web to the Petten Server are stored within the Mat-DB XML module. There they can be checked and updated on-line before they are uploaded into the database. After validation by the source administrator they can immediately be retrieved and evaluated by all project partners. A pilot test with the new XML related data exchange module from test machine into Mat-DB has currently been started within the European 'TMF Standard' R&D project.JRC.F.4-Nuclear design safet

RISE: A Novel Indoor Visual Place Recogniser

This paper presents a new technique to solve the Indoor Visual Place Recognition problem from the Deep Learning perspective. It consists on an image retrieval approach supported by a novel image similarity metric. Our work uses a 3D laser sensor mounted on a backpack with a calibrated spherical camera i) to generate the data for training the deep neural network and ii) to build a database of georeferenced images for an environment. The data collection stage is fully automatic and requires no user intervention for labelling. Thanks to the 3D laser measurements and the spherical panoramas, we can efficiently survey large indoor areas in a very short time. The underlying 3D data associated to the map allows us to define the similarity between two training images as the geometric overlap between the observed pixels. We exploit this similarity metric to effectively train a CNN that maps images into compact embeddings. The goal of the training is to ensure that the L2 distance between the embeddings associated to two images is small when they are observing the same place and large when they are observing different places. After the training, similarities between a query image and the geo-referenced images in the database are efficiently retrieved by performing a nearest neighbour search in the embeddings space.JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit

Mat-DB: A Web-Enabled Materials Database to Support European R&D Projects and Network Activities

Fast access to product specific materials data is one of the challenges in materials technology in order to make full use of the available materials potential. Material databases in combination with the Internet are powerful means to address this issue. The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission at Petten, The Netherlands (JRC) has recently launched the web-enabled Mat-DB for experimentally measured data, which is based on many years of experience in this field. The application is installed on the On-line Data Information Network (ODIN: https://odin.jrc.nl) and is offered to European R&D activities for the management and dissemination of their projects data and documentation. Furthermore, the JRC aims at creating a growing pool of publicly available materials data and analysis routines, which can be used in industry, research and education. A European materials data network could help to overcome the dispersion of effort and lack of coherence of EU research, which is due to inevitable fragmentation within and between the different countries and organizations. It is consistent with the ideas of the 7th Research Framework Programme of the European Commission: ‘Building the Europe of Knowledge’ and may contribute to the enlargement process through supporting candidate country integration.JRC.F.4-Nuclear design safet

Trade analysis and open source information monitoring for nonproliferation

With the Additional Protocol (AP) in force, the IAEA has strengthened tools to verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities. The new state level approach being proposed by IAEA envisions an objective based and information driven safeguards approach further utilizing relevant information to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of safeguards. To this goal the IAEA makes extensive use of open source information. Here open source is broadly defined and any information that is neither classified nor proprietary. It includes, but is not limited to: media sources, government and non-governmental reports and analyses, commercial data, and scientific/technical literature. New sources taken into account include trade-related information. JRC has surveyed and catalogued open sources on import-export customs trade data and developed tools for their use in safeguards. Tests on the use of these data by the IAEA suggest safeguards relevance along the following lines: support the IAEA State evaluation process and improve understanding of a State’s nuclear programme. Verify import and export declarations made by States under Additional Protocols (APs) and Identifying indicators of activities to be safeguarded or to be declared under APs. In the field of open source monitoring, JRC is developing and operating a “Nuclear Security Media Monitor” (NSMM), which is a web-based multilingual news aggregation system that automatically collects news articles from pre-defined web sites. NSMM is a domain specific version of the general Europe Media Monitor (EMM) and monitors – additionally to the 2500 general web news sources targeted by EMM- more than 150 nuclear specific sites (including NGOs, academic, (inter-)governmental and scientific/technical sites). Filters remove articles not relevant to the nuclear domain and group them into various areas of interest, e.g. related to different steps of the nuclear fuel cycle or to relevant countries. NSMM has been established in a joint project with IAEA with the aim to streamline IAEA’s acquisition and analysis of open source information and develop the current information collection/newsletter production process to a more efficient system. The paper will illustrate what are the sources of trade data relevant for nonproliferation and the possible uses to inform verification activities and will present the main aspects of the NSMM also by illustrating some of the uses done internally at JRC.JRC.E.8-Nuclear securit