Correction algorithm for environmental scattering in industrial computed tomography

Abstract Scattering of X-ray photons in the environment causes artefacts in high-energy X-ray computed tomography (CT). Here, an analytical correction formula applied to transmission images is presented and experimentally validated on data from a 450 kV cone-beam CT-system. This method increases the contrast of CT-images from a large aluminium step cylinder by a factor exceeding 2.5. For complex objects, the procedure reduces the variance of the attenuation values for the material given an optimal correction parameter. For the considered source parameters, this correction parameter could be derived from the measurement data by a simple procedure with a correlation coefficient of 0.996±0.005.