  Among numerous applications of muon tomography, deployment in civil
structures has caught attraction of many recently. In this work, the
appropriateness of muon scattering tomography to detect defects in concrete
structures has been studied numerically. A few basic concrete structures that
are frequently used in civil construction, have been considered as test cases.
A simulation has been performed on Geant4 platform where an imaging setup built
with several gaseous ionization detectors, having a specific spatial resolution
for tracking the muons, have been modeled. The images of the test cases with
and without the defect have been simulated for a month-long exposure of cosmic
muons on the basis of their scattering from the composite concrete structures.
The images have been compared using t-test to evaluate the performance of the
imaging setup in identifying the defects. Further processing of the images has
been done with a pattern recognition method proposed in our earlier work to
improve defect identification. The efficacy of the said method has been
evaluated in terms of the PRM-score devised in this work. The limitation and
advantages of the present application of the muon scattering tomography
encompassing the imaging and image processing technique in non-destructive
evaluation of concrete structures have been discussed.
