Large field of view computed laminography with the asymmetric rotational scanning geometry

Abstract

X-ray computed laminography (CL) is used in the fields of industrial inspection and medical imaging. It can provide the internal structure three-dimensional (3D) information of a region of the objects nondestructively. It is important to the clinical diagnosis and the quality control of flat objects like printed circuit boards, aircraft wings and satellite solar panels. With the restriction that the imaging region must be within the X-ray beam formed by the X-ray source and the detector, the imaging field of view of CL is limited by the size of detector. A new CL method with an asymmetric rotational cone-beam scanning geometry, called large field of view CL, is presented to overcome the existing disadvantage. It can extend the imaging region when the imaging spatial resolution keeps the same as that of the conventional CL. It can also improve the imaging spatial resolution when the imaging region keeps the same as that of the conventional CL. The asymmetric configuration can be achieved by offsetting the detector from the conventional symmetric configuration. It does not, however, require new detectors and X-ray source nor alter the scanning mechanical system. The filtered back-projection (FBP) reconstruction algorithm and the data truncation smoothing functions have been deduced to reconstruct the images directly from the data acquired with this asymmetric configuration. We performed numerical studies and experiments to demonstrate and validate the proposed approach. Results in these studies and experiments confirm that the proposed method can enlarge the imaging region and improve the spatial resolution. The proposed approach may find applications in the CL system with the rotational scanning geometry.