Adaptive region of interest method for analytical micro-CT reconstruction

The real-time imaging is important in automatic successive inspection with micro-computerized tomography (micro-CT). Generally, the size of the detector is chosen according to the most probable size of the measured object to acquire all the projection data. Given enough imaging area and imaging resolution of X-ray detector, the detector is larger than specimen projection area, which results in redundant data in the Sinogram. The process of real-time micro-CT is computation-intensive because of the large amounts of source and destination data. The speed of the reconstruction algorithm can't always meet the requirements of real-time applications. A preprocessing method called adaptive region of interest (AROI), which detects the object's boundaries automatically to focus the active Sinogram regions, is introduced into the analytical reconstruction algorithm in this paper. The AROI method reduces the volume of the reconstructing data and thus directly accelerates the reconstruction process. It has been further shown that image quality is not compromised when applying AROI, while the reconstruction speed is increased as the square of the ratio of the sizes of the detector and the specimen slice. In practice, the conch reconstruction experiment indicated that the process is accelerated by 5.2 times with AROI and the imaging quality is not degraded. Therefore, the AROI method improves the speed of analytical micro-CT reconstruction significantly.