Structure-preserving dual-energy CT for luggage screening

We propose a new structure-preserving dual-energy (SPDE) CT inversion technique for luggage screening, which can mitigate metal artifacts and provide precise object localization. Such artifact reduction can increase material identification accuracy in security applications. Our main objective is formation of enhanced photoelectric and Compton pixel property images from dual-energy X-ray tomographic data. We achieve this aim by incorporating three important elements in a single unified framework. First, we generate our images as the solution of a joint optimization problem, which explicitly models the projection process. Second, we include metal aware data weighting to reduce streaks and metal artifacts. Third, we estimate a regularized joint boundary field and apply it to both the photoelectric and Compton images in order to improve object localization as well as smoothing inside the objects. We evaluate the performance of the method using real dual-energy data. We demonstrate a significant reduction in noise and metal artifacts.