Novel multi-energy X-ray imaging methods: Experimental results of new image processing techniques to improve material separation in computed tomography and direct radiography

We present novel multi-energy X-ray imaging methods for direct radiography and computed tomography. The goal is to determine the contribution of thickness, mass density and atomic composition to the measured X-ray absorption in the sample. Algorithms have been developed by our own to calculate new X-ray images using data from an unlimited amount of scans/images of different tube voltages by pixelwise fitting of the detected gray levels. The resulting images then show a contrast that is influenced either by the atomic number of the elements in the sample (photoelectric interactions) or by the mass density (Compton scattering). For better visualization, those images can be combined to a color image where different materials can easily be distinguished. In the case of computed tomography no established true multi-energy methodology that does not require an energy sensitive detector is known to the authors. The existing dual-energy methods often yield noisy results that need spatial averaging for clear interpretation. The goal of the method presented here is to qualitatively calculate atomic number and mass density images without loosing resolution while reducing the noise by the use of more than two X-ray energies. The resulting images are generated without the need of calibration stan-dards in an automatic and fast data processing routine. They provide additional information that might be of special interest in cases like archaeology where the destruction of a sample to determine its composition is no option, but a increase in measurement time is of little concern.