ISSN:
1930-8337
eISSN:
1930-8345
All Issues
Inverse Problems & Imaging
Open Access Articles
Multi-energy CT takes advantage of the non-linearly varying attenuation properties of elemental media with respect to energy, enabling more precise material identification than single-energy CT. The increased precision comes with the cost of a higher radiation dose. A straightforward way to lower the dose is to reduce the number of projections per energy, but this makes tomographic reconstruction more ill-posed. In this paper, we propose how this problem can be overcome with a combination of a regularization method that promotes structural similarity between images at different energies and a suitably selected low-dose data acquisition protocol using non-overlapping projections. The performance of various joint regularization models is assessed with both simulated and experimental data, using the novel low-dose data acquisition protocol. Three of the models are well-established, namely the joint total variation, the linear parallel level sets and the spectral smoothness promoting regularization models. Furthermore, one new joint regularization model is introduced for multi-energy CT: a regularization based on the structure function from the structural similarity index. The findings show that joint regularization outperforms individual channel-by-channel reconstruction. Furthermore, the proposed combination of joint reconstruction and non-overlapping projection geometry enables significant reduction of radiation dose.
Low rank approximation has been extensively studied in the past. It is most suitable to reproduce rectangular like structures in the data. In this work we introduce a generalization using "shifted" rank-
These kind of shifts naturally appear in applications, where an object
The main difficulty of the above stated problem lies in finding a suitable shift vector
We validate our approach in several numerical experiments on different kinds of data. We compare the technique to shift-invariant dictionary learning algorithms. Furthermore, we provide examples from application including object segmentation in non-destructive testing and seismic exploration as well as object tracking in video processing.
An inverse obstacle problem for the wave governed by the wave equation in a two layered medium is considered under the framework of the time domain enclosure method. The wave is generated by an initial data supported on a closed ball in the upper half-space, and observed on the same ball over a finite time interval. The unknown obstacle is penetrable and embedded in the lower half-space. It is assumed that the propagation speed of the wave in the upper half-space is greater than that of the wave in the lower half-space, which is excluded in the previous study: Ikehata and Kawashita, Inverse Problems and Imaging 12 (2018), no.5, 1173-1198. In the present case, when the reflected waves from the obstacle enter the upper half-space, the total reflection phenomena occur, which give singularities to the integral representation of the fundamental solution for the reduced transmission problem in the background medium. This fact makes the problem more complicated. However, it is shown that these waves do not have any influence on the leading profile of the indicator function of the time domain enclosure method.
An inverse obstacle scattering problem for the electromagnetic wave governed by the Maxwell system over a finite time interval is considered. It is assumed that the wave satisfies the Leontovich boundary condition on the surface of an unknown obstacle. The condition is described by using an unknown positive function on the surface of the obstacle which is called the surface admittance. The wave is generated at the initial time by a volumetric current source supported on a very small ball placed outside the obstacle and only the electric component of the wave is observed on the same ball over a finite time interval. It is shown that from the observed data one can extract information about the value of the surface admittance and the curvatures at the points on the surface nearest to the center of the ball. This shows that a single shot contains a meaningful information about the quantitative state of the surface of the obstacle.
EIT is a non-linear ill-posed inverse problem which requires sophisticated regularisation techniques to achieve good results. In this paper we consider the use of structural information in the form of edge directions coming from an auxiliary image of the same object being reconstructed. In order to allow for cases where the auxiliary image does not provide complete information we consider in addition a sparsity regularization for the edges appearing in the EIT image. The combination of these approaches is conveniently described through the parallel level sets approach. We present an overview of previous methods for structural regularisation and then provide a variational setting for our approach and explain the numerical implementation. We present results on simulations and experimental data for different cases with accurate and inaccurate prior information. The results demonstrate that the structural prior information improves the reconstruction accuracy, even in cases when there is reasonable uncertainty in the prior about the location of the edges or only partial edge information is available.
An inverse obstacle problem for the wave equation in a two layered medium is considered. It is assumed that the unknown obstacle is penetrable and embedded in the lower half-space. The wave as a solution of the wave equation is generated by an initial data whose support is in the upper half-space and observed at the same place as the support over a finite time interval. From the observed wave an indicator function in the time domain enclosure method is constructed. It is shown that, one can find some information about the geometry of the obstacle together with the qualitative property in the asymptotic behavior of the indicator function.
In this paper, we investigate the relations between the Radon and weighted divergent beam and cone transforms. Novel inversion formulas are derived for the latter two. The weighted cone transform arises, for instance, in image reconstruction from the data obtained by Compton cameras, which have promising applications in various fields, including biomedical and homeland security imaging and gamma ray astronomy. The inversion formulas are applicable for a wide variety of detector geometries in any dimension. The results of numerical implementation of some of the formulas in dimensions two and three are also provided.
An inverse obstacle scattering problem for the wave governed by the Maxwell system in the time domain, in particular, over a finite time interval is considered. It is assumed that the electric field
In this paper, a time domain enclosure method for an inverse obstacle scattering problem of electromagnetic wave is introduced. The wave as a solution of Maxwell's equations is generated by an applied volumetric current having an orientation and supported outside an unknown obstacle and observed on the same support over a finite time interval. It is assumed that the obstacle is a perfect conductor. Two types of analytical formulae which employ a single observed wave and explicitly contain information about the geometry of the obstacle are given. In particular, an effect of the orientation of the current is catched in one of two formulae. Two corollaries concerning with the detection of the points on the surface of the obstacle nearest to the centre of the current support and curvatures at the points are also given.
In this paper, we consider a limited data reconstruction problem for temporarily evolving computed tomography (CT), where some regions are static during the whole scan and some are dynamic (intensely or slowly changing). When motion occurs during a tomographic experiment one would like to minimize the number of projections used and reconstruct the image iteratively. To ensure stability of the iterative method spatial and temporal constraints are highly desirable. Here, we present a novel spatial-temporal regularization approach where all time frames are reconstructed collectively as a unified function of space and time. Our method has two main differences from the state-of-the-art spatial-temporal regularization methods. Firstly, all available temporal information is used to improve the spatial resolution of each time frame. Secondly, our method does not treat spatial and temporal penalty terms separately but rather unifies them in one regularization term. Additionally we optimize the temporal smoothing part of the method by considering the non-local patches which are most likely to belong to one intensity class. This modification significantly improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the reconstructed images and reduces computational time. The proposed approach is used in combination with golden ratio sampling of the projection data which allows one to find a better trade-off between temporal and spatial resolution scenarios.
In X-ray computed tomography (CT) it is generally acknowledged that reconstruction methods exploiting image sparsity allow reconstruction from a significantly reduced number of projections. The use of such reconstruction methods is inspired by recent progress in compressed sensing (CS). However, the CS framework provides neither guarantees of accurate CT reconstruction, nor any relation between sparsity and a sufficient number of measurements for recovery, i.e., perfect reconstruction from noise-free data. We consider reconstruction through 1-norm minimization, as proposed in CS, from data obtained using a standard CT fan-beam sampling pattern. In empirical simulation studies we establish quantitatively a relation between the image sparsity and the sufficient number of measurements for recovery within image classes motivated by tomographic applications. We show empirically that the specific relation depends on the image class and in many cases exhibits a sharp phase transition as seen in CS, i.e., same-sparsity images require the same number of projections for recovery. Finally we demonstrate that the relation holds independently of image size and is robust to small amounts of additive Gaussian white noise.
Complex Geometrical Optics (CGO) solutions have, for almost three decades, played a large role in the rigorous analysis of nonlinear inverse problems. They have the added bonus of also being useful in practical reconstruction algorithms. The main benefit of CGO solutions is to provide solutions in the form of almost-exponential functions that can be used in a variety of ways, for example for defining tailor-made nonlinear Fourier transforms to study the unique solvability of a nonlinear inverse problem.
For more information please click the “Full Text” above.
In 2012, there were two scientific conferences in honor of Professor Tony F. Chan's 60th birthday. The first one was ``The International Conference on Scientific Computing'', which took place in Hong Kong from January 4-7. The second one, ``The International Conference on the Frontier of Computational and Applied Mathematics'', was held at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) of UCLA from June 8-10. Invitations were also sent out to conference speakers, participants, Professor Chan's former colleagues, collaborators and students, to solicit for original research papers. After the standard peer review processes, we have collected 23 papers in this special issue dedicated to Professor Chan to celebrate his contribution and leadership in the area of scientific computing and image processing.
For more information please click the “Full Text” above.
We present a method to enhance the quality of a video sequence captured through a turbulent atmospheric medium, and give an estimate of the radiance of the distant scene, represented as a ``latent image,'' which is assumed to be static throughout the video. Due to atmospheric turbulence, temporal averaging produces a blurred version of the scene's radiance. We propose a method combining Sobolev gradient and Laplacian to stabilize the video sequence, and a latent image is further found utilizing the ``lucky region" method. The video sequence is stabilized while keeping sharp details, and the latent image shows more consistent straight edges. We analyze the well-posedness for the stabilizing PDE and the linear stability of the numerical scheme.
Detecting and identifying targets or objects that are present in hyperspectral ground images are of great interest. Applications include land and environmental monitoring, mining, military, civil search-and-rescue operations, and so on. We propose and analyze an extremely simple and efficient idea for template matching based on $l_1$ minimization. The designed algorithm can be applied in hyperspectral classification and target detection. Synthetic image data and real hyperspectral image (HSI) data are used to assess the performance, with comparisons to other approaches, e.g. spectral angle map (SAM), adaptive coherence estimator (ACE), generalized-likelihood ratio test (GLRT) and matched filter. We demonstrate that this algorithm achieves excellent results with both high speed and accuracy by using Bregman iteration.
This volume contains the proceedings of the international conference
held at Stockholm University, August 12-15, 2008. The meeting was dedicated to Jan Boman on the occasion of his 75-th birthday.
We are happy that so many of the participants have contributed to these proceedings with original research articles, some of which have been presented at the conference, others resulting from inspiring discussions during the meeting. A few contributions have also been written by colleagues who were invited but could not come to Stockholm.
For more information please click the “Full Text” above.
Life expectancy in the developed and developing countries is constantly increasing. Medicine has benefited from novel biomarkers for screening and diagnosis. At least for a number of diseases, biomedical imaging is one of the most promising means of early diagnosis. Medical hardware manufacturer's progress has led to a new generation of measurements to understand the human anatomical and functional states. These measurements go beyond simple means of anatomical visualization (e.g. X-ray images) and therefore their interpretation becomes a scientific challenge for humans mostly because of the volume and flow of information as well as their nature. Computer-aided diagnosis develops mathematical models and their computational solutions to assist data interpretation in a clinical setting. In simple words, one would like to be able to provide a formal answer to a clinical question using the available measurements. The development of mathematical models for automatic clinical interpretation of multi-modalities is a great challenge.
For more information please click the “Full Text” above.
We propose a fast algorithm for solving the Basis Pursuit problem, minu $\{|u|_1\: \Au=f\}$, which has application to compressed sensing. We design an efficient method for solving the related unconstrained problem minu $E(u) = |u|_1 + \lambda \||Au-f\||^2_2$ based on a greedy coordinate descent method. We claim that in combination with a Bregman iterative method, our algorithm will achieve a solution with speed and accuracy competitive with some of the leading methods for the basis pursuit problem.
This special issue is dedicated to Professors David Colton and Rainer Kress in honor of their contribution and leadership in the area of direct and inverse scattering theory for more then 30 years. The papers in this special issue were solicited from the invited speakers at the International Conference on Inverse Scattering Problems organized in honor of the 65th birthdays of David Colton and Rainer Kress held in the seaside resort of Sestry Levante, Italy, May 8-10, 2008.
As organizers of this conference and close collaborators of Professors Colton and Kress, we are very honored to have had the opportunity to facilitate this special scientific and social event. It was a particular occasion that gathered together long term colleagues, collaborators, former students and friends of Professors Colton and Kress. And now it gives us particular pleasure to be guest editors of this special issue of Inverse Problems and Imaging which is a collection of original research papers in the area of scattering theory and inverse problems. Much of the work presented here has been directly or indirectly influenced by these two scientists, offering the reader a glimpse of their significant impact in this research area.
We would like to thank all of those who have contributed a paper for this special issue. A special thanks goes to the Editor in Chief of Inverse Problems and Imaging, Lassi Päivärinta, for supporting and facilitating this publication. We would also like to thank all the participants of the Sestri Levante Conference who made such a successful, stimulating and pleasant event possible. Last (but definitely not least!) we would like to thank the sponsors of the conference: the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development of the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the University of Genova, the University of Verona, the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica - Gruppo Nazionale di Calcolo Scientifico, the University of Göttingen, the University of Delaware and INRIA Center of Saclay Ile de France.
The fields of inverse problems and imaging are new and flourishing branches of both pure and applied mathematics. In particular, these areas are concerned with recovering information about an object from indirect, incomplete or noisy observations and have become one of the most important and topical fields of modern applied mathematics.
The modern study of inverse problems and imaging applies a wide range of geometric and analytic methods which in turn creates new connections to various fields of mathematics, ranging from geometry, microlocal analysis and control theory to mathematical physics, stochastics and numerical analysis. Research in inverse problems has shown that many results of pure mathematics are in fact crucial components of practical algorithms. For example,a theoretical understanding of the structures that ideal measurements should reveal, or of the non-uniqueness of solutions,can lead to a dramatic increase in the quality of imaging applications. On the other hand,inverse problems have also raised many new mathematical problems. For example, the invention of the inverse spectral method to solve the Korteweg-de Vries equation gave rise to the field of integrable systems and the mathematical theory of solitons.
For more information please click the “Full Text” above.
2020
Impact Factor: 1.639
5 Year Impact Factor: 1.720
2020 CiteScore: 2.6
Authors
Editors
Referees
Librarians
Email Alert
Add your name and e-mail address to receive news of forthcoming issues of this journal:
[Back to Top]