Effective sinogram-inpainting for metal artifacts reduction in X-ray CT images

This research features a new idea for effective sinogram inpainting that boosts the MAR (metal artifacts reduction) performance. We have indentified neighbor pixels that are relevant to the target pixel to be inpainted and only used these pixels in determining an inpainting value. Experimental results show that our methods based on the proposed idea significantly reduce inpainting errors, enhancing the MAR performance. They can be incorporated into any sinogram-inpainting based MAR algorithms.