ANALYSIS OF X-RAY IMAGE QUALITIES-ACCURACY OF SHAPE AND CLEARNESS OF IMAGE-USING X-RAY DIGITAL TOMOSYNTHESIS

X-ray laminography and DT(digital tomosynthesis) that can form a cross-sectional image of 3-D objects promis to be good solutions for inspecting interior defects of industrial products. DT is a kind of laminography technique and the difference is in the fact that it synthesizes the several projected images by use of the digitized memory and computation. The quality of images acquired from the DT system varies according to image synthesizing methods, the number of images used in image synthesizing, and X-ray projection angles. In this paper, a new image synthesizing method named 'log-root method' is proposed to get clear and accurate cross-sectional images, which can reduce both artifact and blurring generated by materials out of focal plane. To evaluate the quality of cross-sectional images, two evaluating criteria : (1) shape accuracy and (2) clearness of the cross-sectional images are defined. Based on these criteria, a series of simulations are performed, and the results show the superiority of the new synthesizing method over the existing ones such as averaging and minimum methods.