Image Reconstruction for Limited-Angle Electron Beam X-Ray Computed Tomography With Energy-Integrating Detectors for Multiphase Flows

Abstract

We propose a new iterative X-ray computed tomography (CT) reconstruction algorithm for electron beam X-ray tomography of multiphase flows in metal pipes. This application uses limited-angle projections due to the fixed configuration, and semiconductor-type energy-integrating detectors. For the data-fitting objective function, the proposed method incorporates a nonlinear Gaussian model with object-dependent variance to approximate the compound Poisson distribution, and a dual material decomposition based on images of the volume fractions of metal (titanium) and liquid (water). The volume fraction-based material decomposition enables us to use a maximum sum constraint that helps address the ill-posed nature of the problem. Two different regularizers, $\ell _0$ norm and edge-preserving hyperbola regularizers, are applied differently on each volume fraction image based on the characteristics of objects in each image. A synthetic phantom simulation illustrates that the proposed algorithm enables the aforementioned CT system to achieve high quality images by minimizing artifacts induced by limited-angle data and beam hardening.