Towards automatic inspection of nuclear fuel elements in spent fuel pools: Audio analysis

In this article, we propose and explore a novel step in the digitization of the mapping of the spent fuel pool of nuclear power plants, in which the audio signal from the operator's microphone is used to obtain the identification codes of those components that are in each of the cells of the pool. In this way, we have not only an acquisition system but also a verification system that can be used in combination with the outcome of the analysis of the video signal. We developed an algorithm that uses at its core one of the latest models of multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition to transcribe audio signal, and with a post-processing of the timed transcriptions we build the identification code of fuel heads and other components. Results show a very high accuracy in audios from real recording of Spanish nuclear facilities, and the methodology proposed is easily extensible to other nuclear facilities in the world.