Eliminating beam-hardening artifacts in high-energy industrial computed tomography(ICT)

Beam-hardening is caused by the filtering of a polychromatic X-ray beam by the objects in the scan field. In industrial field, both the X-ray source and the attenuation characteristics of the materials are different with those in medical field. Methods that work in medical field cannot give satisfying results here. The author has developed a computer software, named simulative tomographic machine (STM) platform. STM platform is designed to simulate the procedure of high-energy ICT scanning. It is also the platform for developing data process algorithm. With the STM platform, this paper presents an efficient correction technique, which can eliminate beam-hardening artifacts efficiently in high-energy ICT. The new algorithm is based on the following facts: the attenuation coefficient of each substance is precisely known; the polychromatic spectrum of accelerator can be computed with Monte Carlo (MC) method; the total photon interaction cross-section of most inspected object can be treated as constant in the energy region between 1.5 and 9MeV. The monochromatic projection can be computed from the polychromatic projection with an iterative algorithm. So we can reconstruct perfect image from the projection made only by high-energy photons.