We evaluate the impact of denoising and Metal Artefact Reduction (MAR) on 3D object segmentation and classification in low-resolution, cluttered dual-energy Computed Tomography (CT). To this end, we present a novel 3D materials-based segmentation technique based on the Dual-Energy Index (DEI) to automatically generate subvolumes for classification. Subvolume classification is performed using an extension of Extremely Randomised Clustering (ERC) forest codebooks, constructed using dense feature-point sampling and multiscale Density Histogram (DH) descriptors. Within this experimental framework, we evaluate the impact on classification accuracy and computational expense of pre-processing by intensity thresholding, Non-Local Means (NLM) filtering, Linear Interpolation-based MAR (LIMar) and Distance-Driven MAR (DDMar) in the domain of 3D baggage security screening. We demonstrate that basic NLM filtering, although removing fewer artefacts, produces state-of-the-art classification results comparable to the more complex DDMar but at a significant reduction in computational cost - bringing into question the importance (in terms of automated CT analysis) of computationally expensive artefact reduction techniques. Overall, it was found that the use of MAR pre-processing approaches produced only a marginal improvement in classification performance (< 1%) at considerable additional computational cost (> 10×) when compared to NLM pre-processing.
Keywords: DECT; Denoising; Dual-energy Computed Tomography; Metal artefact reduction; classification; segmentation.