Detection of ionizing radiations using CMOS sensor from consumer camera device

The availability of low-cost consumer camera device that use standardCMOS sensor technology enabled us to investigate the possibility of usingsuch device to detect ionizing radiations. A CMOS with active-pixel sensorfrom a webcam with built-in electronics was evaluated in this early prelim-inary works for the detection ofγphotons from137Cs source. A computerprogram was written in Python utilizing the openCV library to record thedigitized data from the webcam. The CMOS sensor with a simple systemsetup was found able to detect theγphotons.