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Photon counting detectors (PCD) offer new possibilities for x-ray micro computed tomography (CT) in the field of non-destructive testing. For large and/or dense objects with high atomic numbers the problem of scattered radiation and beam hardening severely influences the image quality. This work shows that using an energy discriminating PCD based on CdTe allows to address these problems by intrinsically reducing both the influence of scattering and beam hardening.
Based on 2D-radiographic measurements it is shown that by energy thresholding the influence of scattered radiation can be reduced by up to in case of a PCD compared to a conventional energy-integrating detector (EID).
To demonstrate the capabilities of a PCD in reducing beam hardening, cupping artefacts are analyzed quantitatively. The PCD results show that the higher the energy threshold is set, the lower the cupping effect emerges. But since numerous beam hardening correction algorithms exist, the results of the PCD are compared to EID results corrected by common techniques. Nevertheless, the highest energy thresholds yield lower cupping artefacts than any of the applied correction algorithms.
As an example of a potential industrial CT application, a turbine blade is investigated by CT. The inner structure of the turbine blade allows for comparing the image quality between PCD and EID in terms of absolute contrast, as well as normalized signal-to-noise and contrast-to-noise ratio. Where the absolute contrast can be improved by raising the energy thresholds of the PCD, it is found that due to lower statistics the normalized contrast-to-noise-ratio could not be improved compared to the EID. These results might change to the contrary when discarding pre-filtering of the x-ray spectra and thus allowing more low-energy photons to reach the detectors.
Despite still being in the early phase in technological progress, PCDs already allow to improve CT image quality compared to conventional detectors in terms of scatter and beam hardening reduction.
Laminography is a widely used NDT technique for large flat object which cannot be investigated by traditional computed tomography. However, due to the limited scanning angle of laminography, the reconstructed image has more artifact interference, which seriously affects the reconstructed image quality. Reducing artifacts of the laminography image and enhancing the images have become important research effort. In this paper, we present dual-energy materials characterization methods based on photon counting detectors to reduce artifacts and enhance image for laminography. The photon counting detector used in this study allows the setting of two independent energy thresholds in order to acquire dual-energy images for laminography from a single scan. The dual energy imaging methods of basis material decomposition (BMD) and weighted logarithmic subtraction (WLS) were studied in the paper with respect to laminography image enhancement. A fast decomposition algorithm on laminographic projection domain with approximating the inverse dual-energy equations to calculate the thickness of basic materials was used in the BMD dual-energy imaging methods. The experimental results show that the BMD method can characterize materials and enhance features of the basic material within the laminographic dataset. In the WLS method, a linear operation was applied on dual-energy images reconstruction directly, which can eliminate the attenuation of one specific material in the resultant image by setting an appropriate weighting factor. In our experiments. WLS method was used successfully to eliminate the strong artifacts generated by the special material and enhance the images. Dual-energy materials characterization methods based on photon counting detectors show potential applications in laminography.