Reduced projection angles for binary tomography with particle aggregation

Evol Intell. 2016;9(3):67-79. doi: 10.1007/s12065-016-0140-7. Epub 2016 Aug 8.

Abstract

This paper extends particle aggregate reconstruction technique (PART), a reconstruction algorithm for binary tomography based on the movement of particles. PART supposes that pixel values are particles, and that particles diffuse through the image, staying together in regions of uniform pixel value known as aggregates. In this work, a variation of this algorithm is proposed and a focus is placed on reducing the number of projections and whether this impacts the reconstruction of images. The algorithm is tested on three phantoms of varying sizes and numbers of forward projections and compared to filtered back projection, a random search algorithm and to SART, a standard algebraic reconstruction method. It is shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms the aforementioned algorithms on small numbers of projections. This potentially makes the algorithm attractive in scenarios where collecting less projection data are inevitable.

Keywords: Binary tomography; Discrete tomography; Particle aggregation; Reduced projections; Underdetermined linear systems.