Shape recovery from sparse tomographic X-ray data

A two-dimensional tomographic problem is studied. The target is assumed to be a homogeneous object bounded by a smooth curve. A Non Uniform Rational Basis Splines (NURBS) curve is used as computational representation of the boundary. This approach conveniently provides the result in a format readily compatible with computer-aided design (CAD) software. However, the linear tomography task becomes a nonlinear inverse problem due to the NURBS-based parameterization. Therefore, Bayesian inversion with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is used for calculating an estimate of the NURBS control points. The reconstruction method is tested with both simulated data and measured X-ray projection data. The proposed method recovers the shape and the attenuation coefficient significantly better than the baseline algorithm (optimally thresholded total variation regularization), but at the cost of heavier computation.