Improve spatial resolution by Modeling Finite Focal Spot (MFFS) for industrial CT reconstruction

The finite focal spot is one of the major limitations of the high spatial resolution CT, especially to the high-energy industrial CT system with a macro-focus x-ray source. In this paper, we propose an efficient reconstruction framework through finite focal spot size based projection modeling to improve the spatial resolution of current industrial CT system, and demonstrate the superior performance of this method. First of all, the blurred projection produced by a finite size source is modeled as the integral ideal projection of a given point source over the finite focal spot support. Under the model discretization, the approximate linear equivalence relation between the actual finite focus model and the ideal point source model is established. Then a projection recovery method with this relationship is presented to recover the projection of the finer focal spot from the blurred projection. Finally, a high-spatial resolution image can be reconstructed from the recovered projections using the standard Filtered Back-Projection (FBP) algorithm. Furthermore the noise in the reconstructed image with different model parameters is studied and a difference image based fusion method is presented for the further suppression of the noise caused by the projection analysis processing. Both numerical simulations and real experiments have shown that the proposed reconstruction framework with the outstanding performance and efficiency characteristics can significantly enhance the spatial resolutions of current high-energy industrial CT systems. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America