Ring artifacts removal via spatial sparse representation in cone beam CT

This paper is about the ring artifacts removal method in cone beam CT. Cone beam CT images often suffer from disturbance of ring artifacts which caused by the non-uniform responses of the elements in detectors. Conventional ring artifacts removal methods focus on the correlation of the elements and the ring artifacts’ structural characteristics in either sinogram domain or cross-section image. The challenge in the conventional methods is how to distinguish the artifacts from the intrinsic structures; hence they often give rise to the blurred image results due to over processing. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of the ring artifacts in spatial space, different from the continuous essence of 3D texture feature of the scanned objects, the ring artifacts are displayed discontinuously in spatial space, specifically along z-axis. Thus we can easily recognize the ring artifacts in spatial space than in cross-section. As a result, we choose dictionary representation for ring artifacts removal due to its high sensitivity to structural information. We verified our theory both in spatial space and coronal-section, the experimental results demonstrate that our methods can remove the artifacts efficiently while maintaining image details.