Localisation of a source of hazardous substance dispersion using binary measurements

The problem is to estimate the parameters of a source continuously releasing hazardous material into the atmosphere. The concentration measurements are collected at a number of known locations by a moving binary sensor, characterised by an unknown threshold. The paper formulated a solution in the Bayesian framework, using a dispersion model of Poisson distributed particle encounters in a turbulent flow and assuming the environmental parameters (wind velocity, diffusivity, particle lifetime) are known. The method is implemented using an importance sampling technique and successfully validated with three experimental datasets under different wind conditions. In this context, the estimates of the source release rate are not of practical use, being scaled with an unknown constant related to the binary threshold.