A comparative evaluation of ring artifacts reduction filters for X-ray computed microtomography images

Abstract

Concentric rings are among the most recurrent artifacts in X-ray computed microtomography imaging. Their presence have a negative impact on the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data. An interesting approach for ring artifacts removal is based on direct filtering of the reconstructed slices. Slice filtering does not require additional imaging data (i.e. flat fielding images), it does not exclude methods applied during the reconstruction process (i.e. sinogram processing) and it can be applied also to past archived tomographic data. In this work four different approaches for the removal of complete ring artifacts are presented and preliminary compared using a suitably created artificial image as well as an experimental image. After a critical analysis of the considered filters, the results support that an approach based on a modified Sijbers and Postnov [1] method effectively compensates ring artifacts in reconstructed slices, thus resulting in a powerful tool for established microtomography workflows.

An introduction to the application of X-ray microtomography to the three-dimensional study of igneous rocks

“…Image processing correction algorithms are used for the compensation of such ring artifacts (e.g. Barrett and Keat, 2004;Brun et al, 2010aBrun et al, , 2011Sijbers and Postnov, 2004). Fig.…”

Size and specimen-dependent strategy for x-ray micro-ct and tem correlative analysis of nervous system samples

“…Filtered Back Projection (FBP) was used and common image processing was adopted to perform the required steps of flat fielding and image alignment with respect to the actual center of rotation 26 . Ring removal filters 27 were also applied to compensate the inhomogeneity of pixel response caused by the detector used at binning 1 × 1. Further visual inspection of the reconstructed virtual stack was performed with the ImageJ software with the 3D Volume Viewer and the 3D Viewer plugins.…”

Implementation of Dynamic Neutron Radiography and Integrated X-Ray and Neutron Tomography in Porous Carbonate Reservoir Rocks

“…Then, the noise was removed using a 3D Median filter in ImageJ. Ring artifacts on the reconstructed slices were removed using the modified Sijbers & Postonov algorithm (Brun et al, 2011) which is part of the Pore3D software library (Brun et al, 2010;Zandomeneghi et al, 2010). For the NCT with incomplete projections, the MuhRec tomographic reconstruction software was used (Kaestner, 2011).…”