SIViP (2012) 6:41–53
DOI 10.1007/s11760-010-0170-z
ORIGINAL PAPER
Removal of ring artifacts in micro-CT imaging using iterative
morphological filters
Md. Kamrul Hasan · Fazle Sadi · Soo Yeol Lee
Received: 17 May 2009 / Revised: 31 May 2010 / Accepted: 10 June 2010 / Published online: 29 June 2010
© Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010
Abstract In this paper, a novel technique based on morpho-
logical filtering is proposed for the detection and removal of
ring artifacts with different patterns, e.g., sharp isolated rings
with varying intensity, isolated light rings, and band rings,
from the μ- and/or C-Arm CT images. To optimize the per-
formance of our ring removal algorithm, three different types
of iterative morphological filters (IMFs) are proposed here
for different ring patterns. All the IMFs detect the positions
of the defective detector elements using the mean curve con-
structed from the corrupted sinogram. However, the basic
principle of sinogram correction differs. For the elimination
of sharp intense rings, the IMF is directly applied on the raw
projection data for each angle of view, whereas in other cases
an estimate of the ring-noise-free mean curve is first obtained
to remove the ring generating artifacts from the sinogram
data through a normalization process. The effectiveness of
the proposed IMFs is tested for a variety of μ-CT acquired
images. Experimental results show that the IMFs perform
better than the previously reported techniques in the removal
of ring artifacts from real μ-CT images.
Keywords Ring artifact · Sharp ring · Band ring · Mean
curve · Sinogram correction · Iterative morphological filters
Md. K. Hasan · F. Sadi
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology,
Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh
e-mail: khasan@eee.buet.ac.bd
Md. K. Hasan · S. Y. Lee (B)
Department of Biomedical Engineering,
Kyung Hee University, Yongin, South Korea
e-mail: sylee01@khu.ac.kr
1 Introduction
High-resolution μ-CT and C-Arm CT images reconstructed
from the 2D X-ray projection data acquired with a flat-panel
detector (FPD) are often corrupted by serious ring artifacts.
They appear in the form of circles in the reconstructed image.
Detector gain inhomogeneities and/or defective detector pix-
els cause ring artifacts in the reconstructed image. The ring
artifacts severely impair visualization and quantification of
the anatomic and pathological features. Moreover, in digi-
tal computation these artifacts are considered as an integral
part of the image by the computer. As a result, the whole
analysis and diagnostic process cannot be automated. As the
ring artifacts complicate the post-processing and quantitative
analysis of the data, removal or at least significant reduction
of these artifacts is essential.
Severity of the ring artifact problem can be somewhat
reduced using the X-ray image intensifiers (XRII) instead of
the FPDs. However, low signal-to-noise (SNR) and nonho-
mogeneous image quality across the output image due to the
convex input screen of XRIIs limits their use. Therefore, the
C-Arm CTs and μ-CTs are still commonly equipped with
FPDs because of their several advantages over the XRIIs.
Despite their high sensitivity, these detectors, however, suf-
fer from pixel nonuniformity. Since the nonuniformity is
often fluctuating depending on the operating conditions
(e.g., tube voltage and tube current), it has been very dif-
ficult to remove the ring artifacts from the CT images taken
with FPDs. Though the detector calibration scheme and built-
in white image correction algorithm can reduce the detec-
tor pixel problem to some extent, the ring artifact problem
cannot be avoided in the 2D radiographic projection data.
Even a small imperfection produces ring artifact in the recon-
structed image. Ring correction algorithm as a post-processor
is, therefore, indispensable while using the FPDs.
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Several methods have been reported so far to suppress
the ring artifacts from CT images [1–7]. Ring artifact reduc-
tion without impairing the image quality is still a challenging
problem for the researchers. Directly processing the ring arti-
fact corrupted image as reported in [2] is one way which may
be referred to as the post-processing approach. While it may
be tempting to detect and remove the artifact in the image
domain rather than the sinogram domain, the extra artifacts
inherently generated along with the ring artifacts because of
the filtered back projection reconstruction procedure cannot
be easily detected and removed by signal processing tech-
niques in the image domain. Since it is the 2D radiographic
projection data, generally known as the sinogram [8], which
are actually corrupted, some reported methods dealt with the
raw sinogram, referred to as the preprocessing approaches
[1,3,4,6,7]. At early stages, the flat-field method was pro-
posed in the literature [9]. This involved multi-time scanning
through air prior to main scanning of the object. Though the
destruction of useful information was checked in this method,
the expected amount of ring reduction was not achieved [2].
Later on, the method of smoothing the curve of mean attenu-
ation at each detector over all angles—which will be referred
to as the mean curve in this work—has been studied by many
researchers. Adoption of moving average (MA) as a smooth-
ing technique has been frequently practiced as it results in
significant reduction of the ring artifacts [3,6]. But along
with this appreciable amount of ring reduction, this method
also results in a significant loss of information, blurring effect
and vulnerability to invasion of other artifacts on the recon-
structed image. As the median is better than the mean at
preserving the sharp details due to image feature, the median
filtering (MedF) method has been also used by the research-
ers [4,6]. The median filter is particularly good in remov-
ing the sharp noise such as, shot noise or “salt and pepper”
noise, while preserving the edges. Thus, the MedF may be
suitable for the reduction of isolated rings but not for the
clustered rings. In [10], Bovik provides a detailed analysis
of the artifacts introduced by the median filters. In [4], two
approaches based on the type of detector faults have been
adopted. The location variant defective cells were corrected
using the MedF, while the location invariant defective cells
were corrected using an interpolation method after the detec-
tion via the wavelet transform. In [1], a frequency domain
filtering technique has been reported for the removal of ring
artifacts. The basic concept was to use a low-pass filter to
suppress the high-frequency components resulted from the
ring artifacts. The filter cut-off frequency and order have to
be appropriately selected depending on the type and number
of defects in the raw projection data.
In this paper, we develop a new ring artifact removal
method based on the mathematical morphology (MM). The
proposed artifact reduction procedure consists of two steps:
one to remove the individual rings and the other to remove
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the band rings. As the individual rings mostly show up in two
patterns, intense and light, different filters are also designed
for them. In our proposed method, customized morpholog-
ical filters are applied on the mean curve to detect the ring
positions for these three kinds of rings. For the estimation of
intense ring corrupted regions, a novel method based on the
morphological filters is proposed for direct correction of only
the defective spots of the sinogram data. For the identification
of defective detector elements, the mean curve is computed
from the raw projection data, and a dynamic threshold is
defined for this purpose. The filter is implemented in an iter-
ative manner and the stopping criterion is defined by a rule
of thumb. After detecting the ring positions from the mean
curve processed by the morphological filter, the estimation
part is carried out directly on the sinogram through the IMF
suitable for the sharp ring elimination. The inherent strength
of this approach is not to distort the uncorrupted regions in
the sinogram and thus no processing error is introduced. For
the light individual rings and band rings, the estimation of
the corrupted regions in the sinogram is made through a nor-
malization principle [6]. This is because the ring causing
deviations with small magnitude lie within the vicinity of the
important details of the image in the sinogram. Therefore,
defining a precise threshold for the direct sinogram correc-
tion often becomes difficult, and there is always a risk of
smoothing the image details. In such cases, the normaliza-
tion of the sinogram through the estimated and corrupted
mean curves provides a defensive approach, minimizing the
risk of image distortion. The performance of the IMF is fur-
ther enhanced by calculating the gross variation of the mean
curve, which assists in defining a proper convergence crite-
rion for the proposed morphological filter.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 states the
basic principle to be used for the ring detection and elimina-
tion. Section 3 describes the iterative morphological filters
for the removal of ring artifact from the CT images. The
detection and elimination process for different ring patterns
are outlined in the subsections. The convergence of the itera-
tive morphological filters is described in Sect. 4. The experi-
mental results for the real micro-CT images are presented in
Sect. 5. Finally, the paper concludes with some remarks in
section VI.
2 Basic principle
The error E(t) in the raw projection data P̃(θ, t) causing ring
artifact in the reconstructions can be related to the error-free
projection data P(θ, t) as follows [6]:
P̃(θ, t) = P(θ, t) + E(t), for all θ (1)
It can be assumed that P̃(θ, t) averaged over θ would be
fairly smooth over t but E(t) would not. Then, an estimate