Object-Based Image Formation in Cluttered Environments from Polychromatic X-ray Data
F3-A2/F3-A3

Download the 2012 Project Report

Spectral computed tomography (CT) has become possible with the development of pho­ton counting X-ray detector technology. Energy selective measurement capabilities of these devices open the doors to many exciting directions in CT research. In this work we assume perfect energy resolution at detectors, which results in a family of monochromatic CT problems. We propose a ten­sor based iterative algorithm that simultaneously reconstructs the X-ray attenuation distribution for each energy level. Specifically, we model the multi-spectral unknown as a 3rd order tensor where first two dimensions are in space and the 3rd dimension is in energy. This approach allows the design of a regularizer based on low rank assumptions on the multi-spectral unknown where we apply ten­sor spectral norm penalties. In addition, when accompanied to total variation (TV) it enhances the regularization capability and provides superior reconstructions. Additionally, we have developed an adaptively weighted L2 norm regularizer with excellent edge preserving capabilities. The problem is cast as a convex optimization problem that is solved using the alternating direction method of multi­pliers (ADMM). Simulation results show that the proposed regularizer is applicable to the spectral CT problem and reliable in recovering multi-linear structures in an inverse problem set up.

Our work introduces a novel polychromatic dual energy imaging algorithm with an emphasis on detection of explosives
F1-A2/F3-A3 Project Overview
Project Leader
  • Eric Miller
    Professor
    Tufts University
    Email

Students Currently Involved in Project
  • Oguz Semerici
    Tufts University