Image reconstruction using projections from a few views by discrete steering combined with DART

In this paper, we propose an algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) based discrete tomography method to reconstruct an image accurately using projections from a few views. We specifically consider the problem of reconstructing an image of bottles filled with various types of liquids from X-ray projections. By exploiting the fact that bottles are usually filled with homogeneous material, we show that it is possible to obtain accurate reconstruction with only a few projections by an ART based algorithm. In order to deal with various types of liquids in our problem, we first introduce our discrete steering method which is a generalization of the binary steering approach for our proposed multi-valued discrete reconstruction. The main idea of the steering approach is to use slowly varying thresholds instead of fixed thresholds. We further improve reconstruction accuracy by reducing the number of variables in ART by combining our discrete steering with the discrete ART (DART) that fixes the values of interior pixels of segmented regions considered as reliable. By simulation studies, we show that our proposed discrete steering combined with DART yields superior reconstruction than both discrete steering only and DART only cases. The resulting reconstructions are quite accurate even with projections using only four views.