An alternating direction algorithm for two-phase flow visualization using gamma computed tomography

Abstract

In order to build high-speed imaging systems with low cost and low radiation leakage, the number of radioactive sources and detectors in the multiphase flow computed tomography (CT) system has to be limited. Moreover, systematic and random errors are inevitable in practical applications. The limited and corrupted measurement data have made the tomographic inversion process the most critical part in multiphase flow CT. Although various iterative reconstruction algorithms have been developed based on least squares minimization, the imaging quality is still inadequate for the reconstruction of relatively complicated bubble flow. This paper extends an alternating direction method (ADM), which is originally proposed in compressed sensing, to image two-phase flow using a low-energy γ-CT system. An l(1) norm-based regularization technique is utilized to treat the ill-posedness of the inverse problem, and the image reconstruction model is reformulated into one having partially separable objective functions, thereafter a dual-based ADM is adopted to solve the resulting problem. The feasibility is demonstrated in prototype experiments. Comparisons between the ADM and the conventional iterative algorithms show that the former has obviously improved the space resolution in reasonable time.