Task-Specific Information In X-Ray Diffraction And Transmission Modalities: A Comparative Analysis

We develop a framework to analyze the information content of X-ray measurement data for the task of material discrimination. This task-specific information (TSI) analysis provides valuable information for system design and optimization. We employ Bhattacharyya distance (BD) between measurements of different materials as the TSI metric in our analysis framework, because BD is closely related to the bounds on the probability of error (P-e). We apply this framework to compare an X-ray diffraction-based system with an X-ray attenuation-based system for several materials and different detector geometries.