In-line stationary multi-source tomosynthesis for high throughput 3D x-ray inspection: a simulation study

Abstract

An alternative in-line X-ray imaging method was investigated in order to visualize the internal object structure with high inspection throughput. A novel in-line tomosynthesis imaging geometry was proposed using the self-manufactured stationary multi-source-based conveyor system. The system consists of five stationary X-ray sources in a tube housing module and a stationary detector while a battery object was moving on a conveyor belt. We studied the effect of X-ray beam tilting and rotation angles with different conveyor speeds and magnification factors to explore the optimized multi-source in-line tomosynthesis imaging condition. The results indicated that the in-line tomosynthesis imaging would give higher imaging speed than the referenced CT imaging by showing a 2.5 times faster image acquisition time. Tomosynthesis with arc-and-tilted multi-source tomosynthesis geometry gave 19% lowered errors (root-mean-square-error) than the straight-beam multi-source tomosynthesis geometry when compared to the ground-truth digital battery phantom. In conclusion, the proposed novel multi-source tomosynthesis geometry would provide higher throughput while maintaining the image quality compared to CT.