Fast and low-dose computed laminography using compressive sensing based technique

Computed laminography (CL) is well known for inspecting microstructures in the materials, weldments and soldering defects in high density packed components or multilayer printed circuit boards. The overload problem on x-ray tube and gross failure of the radio-sensitive electronics devices during a scan are among important issues in CL which needs to be addressed. The sparse-view CL can be one of the viable option to overcome such issues. In this work a numerical aluminum welding phantom was simulated to collect sparsely sampled projection data at only 40 views using a conventional CL scanning scheme i.e. oblique scan. A compressive-sensing inspired total-variation (TV) minimization algorithm was utilized to reconstruct the images. It is found that the images reconstructed using sparse view data are visually comparable with the images reconstructed using full scan data set i.e. at 360 views on regular interval. We have quantitatively confirmed that tiny structures such as copper and tungsten slags, and cop...