A modified discrete tomography for improving the reconstruction of unknown multi-gray-level material in the `missing wedge' situation

J Synchrotron Radiat. 2018 Nov 1;25(Pt 6):1847-1859. doi: 10.1107/S1600577518013681. Epub 2018 Oct 24.

Abstract

Full angular rotational projections cannot always be acquired in tomographic reconstructions because of the limited space in the experimental setup, leading to the `missing wedge' situation. In this paper, a recovering `missing wedge' discrete algebraic reconstruction technique algorithm (rmwDART) has been proposed to solve the `missing wedge' problem and improve the quality of the three-dimensional reconstruction without prior knowledge of the material component's number or the material's values. By using oversegmentation, boundary extraction and mathematical morphological operations, `missing wedge' artifact areas can be located. Then, in the iteration process, by updating the located areas and regions, high-quality reconstructions can be obtained from the simulations, and the reconstructed images based on the rmwDART algorithm can be obtained from soft X-ray nano-computed tomography experiments. The results showed that there is the potential for discrete tomography.

Keywords: discrete algebraic reconstruction technique (DART); limited-angle; missing wedge; over-segmentation; tomography.