Subsampling and inpainting approaches for electron tomography

Abstract

With the aim of addressing the issue of sample damage during electron tomography data acquisition, we propose a number of new reconstruction strategies based on subsampling (which uses only a subset of a full image) and inpainting (recovery of a full image from subsampled one). We point out that the total-variation (TV) inpainting model commonly used to inpaint subsampled images may be inappropriate for 2D projection images of typical TEM specimens. Thus, we propose higher-order TV (HOTV) inpainting, which accommodates the fact that projection images may be inherently smooth, as a more suitable image inpainting scheme. We also describe how the HOTV method can be extended to 3D, a scheme which makes use of both image data and sinogram data. Additionally, we propose gradient subsampling as a more efficient scheme than random subsampling. We make a rigorous comparison of our proposed new reconstruction schemes with existing ones. The new schemes are demonstrated to perform better than or as well as existing schemes, and we show that they outperform existing schemes at low subsampling rates.