Recent research progress on cosmic ray muon imaging technology

Muon imaging technology is an emerging non-destructive testing (NDT) method that has been widely applied in recent years in fields such as volcanic monitoring, mineral exploration, archaeology and cultural heritage conservation, nuclear reactor detection, and industrial blast furnace monitoring. This paper systematically reviews its imaging principles and research progress in these domains, analyzes the current challenges related to detector performance, imaging efficiency, and information dimensionality, and prospects for future development directions, such as detector modularization, intelligent reconstruction algorithms, and multi-modal information fusion. Owing to its unique advantages, the technology is poised for significant application across a broader spectrum of fields.