Impact of lossy compression of X-ray projections onto reconstructed tomographic slices

This study considers a set of representative datasets and investigates the effect of lossy compression of the original X-ray projections onto the final tomographic reconstructions. It demonstrates that a compression factor of at least three to four times does not generally impact the reconstruction quality. Potentially, compression with this factor could therefore be used in a transparent way to the user community, for instance, prior to data archiving. Higher factors (six to eight times) can be achieved for tomographic volumes with a high signal-to-noise ratio as it is the case for phase-retrieved datasets. Although a relationship between the dataset signal-to-noise ratio and a safe compression factor exists, this is not simple and, even considering additional dataset characteristics such as image entropy and high-frequency content variation, the automatic optimization of the compression factor for each single dataset, beyond the conservative factor of three to four, is not straightforward.

Source: Journal of Synchrotron Radiation - July 27, 2020 Category: Physics Authors: Marone, F. Vogel, J. Stampanoni, M. Tags: lossy compression X-ray tomographic imaging research papers Source Type: research