Method of compensating for noise and pulse pile-up in the counting of random pulse data

摘要

A method of counting a plurality of pulses representative of randomly occurring events includes the steps of counting the number of pulses, having an amplitude exceeding a first threshold amplitude, which occur during a predetermined sampling period to obtain a first count and counting the number of pulses, having an amplitude exceeding a second threshold amplitude, which occur during the sampling period to obtain a second count. The second count is compared to a predetermined number and the counts for that sampling period are rejected if the second count is too large. If the second count is not too large, the true count is calculated by subtracting the second count from the first count. This counting procedure is repeated for a preselected number of successive sampling periods. After the final sampling period, all of the true counts are added to obtain an accumulated count and the accumulated count is multiplied by a scaling factor to obtain an output count. This output count is further multiplied by a compensating factor to account for dead time in the detector which receives the incoming data.