Iterative Beam Hardening Correction for Multi-Material Objects

In this paper, we propose an iterative beam hardening correction method that is applicable for the case with multiple materials. By assuming that the materials composing scanned object are known and that they are distinguishable by their linear attenuation coefficients at some given energy, the beam hardening correction problem is converted into a nonlinear system problem, which is then solved iteratively. The reconstructed image is the distribution of linear attenuation coefficient of the scanned object at a given energy. So there are no beam hardening artifacts in the image theoretically. The proposed iterative scheme combines an accurate polychromatic forward projection with a linearized backprojection. Both forward projection and backprojection have high degree of parallelism, and are suitable for acceleration on parallel systems. Numerical experiments with both simulated data and real data verifies the validity of the proposed method. The beam hardening artifacts are alleviated effectively. In addition, the proposed method has a good tolerance on the error of the estimated x-ray spectrum.