CT image reconstruction via industrial CT fast scanning

Abstract

In automated manufacturing and safety inspection, there is a high demand for fast computed tomography (CT) scanning and image reconstruction. Currently, faster scanning can be achieved by reducing the X-ray exposure time within sparse view CT. The faster scanning strategy introduces significant streak artefacts and noise during the sampling process. Consequently, streak artefacts and noise need to be simultaneously suppressed, which is poses a challenge for existing reconstruction methods. This paper presents a fast iterative reconstruction algorithm that can simultaneously suppress both streak artefacts and noise. This method can not only reconstruct high-fidelity images from rapidly acquired projection data, but also has a faster reconstruction speed than the existing iterative reconstruction algorithms. First, we present a high-order multi-directional total variation (HOM-TV) method that specifically focuses on preserving edge details of the image. Then, we present a fast iterative reconstruction model by incorporating HOM-TV and non-local means into the objective function. Finally, the effectiveness of the presented reconstruction model is validated by simulation and real experiments. The faster scanning method can complete the scan in only 5 seconds, and the structural similarity index (SSIM) of the CT image reconstructed by our method is 0.9755, which is higher than 0.0175 of the Fast Null Space Reconstruction (FNSR) algorithm. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) index is 1.656, which is higher than that of the contrast algorithm. In terms of reconstruction time, our algorithm can achieve reconstruction in as little as 36 seconds, outperforming the baseline algorithms.