Effectiveness of Non-Local Means Algorithm with an Industrial 3 MeV LINAC High-Energy X-ray System for Non-Destructive Testing

Industrial high-energy X-ray imaging systems are widely used for non-destructive testing (NDT) to detect defects in the internal structure of objects. Research on X-ray image noise reduction techniques using image processing has been widely conducted with the aim of improving the detection of defects in objects. In this paper, we propose a non-local means (NLM) denoising algorithm to improve the quality of images obtained using an industrial 3 MeV high-energy X-ray imaging system. We acquired X-ray images using various castings and assessed the performance visually and by obtaining the intensity profile, contrast-to-noise ratio, coefficient of variation, and normalized noise power spectrum. Overall, the quality of images processed by the proposed NLM algorithm is superior to those processed by existing algorithms for the acquired casting images. In conclusion, the NLM denoising algorithm offers an efficient and competitive approach to overcome the noise problem in high-energy X-ray imaging systems, and we expect the accompanying image processing software to facilitate and improve image restoration.