2012 International Conference on Systems and Informatics (ICSAI 2012)
Optimal Number Of Pixels In Reconstructed Images
In Electrical Tomography
Shihong Yue Li Chen Lijun Cui Jian Pan
School of Electrical Engineering and Automation
Tianjin University
Tianjin, China
Abstract—The number of pixels in reconstructed images plays an
important part in electrical tomography applications. But so far
there is none efficient method to determine the optimal number
of pixels in reconstructed images in electrical tomography. In this
paper we propose a general index based on maximizing grey
differences between investigated objectives and background. The
proposed index has a robust maximum without any additional
condition and can be encountered in all imaging applications.
Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed index is
suitable for comprehensive determination of number of pixels
and the imaging results are consistent with visual perception.
Keywords-electrical tomography; number of pixels;
reconstructed image
I. INTRODUCTION
Electrical Tomography (ET) has generated a widespread
interest in the area of industrial measurement and biomedical
engineering [1, 2]. The assessment of the image quality such
as image resolution is an important step in ET and a lot effort
has been put in this area in recent years. Woo [3], Kotre [4]
and Adler [5] presented the definitions of spatial resolution
from different aspects. Wheeler [6] used parameters related to
spatial position and centre resolution to evaluate the spatial
resolutions of different areas of the image. An important issue
of resolution in the ET imaging process is to determine a
proper number of pixels. Zhao [7] proposed a multi-parameter
method (includes area error and image centre position error)
for the electrical capacitance tomography image evaluation.
Graham and Adler [8, 9] defined the resolution in terms of
fuzzy radius, and adopted the ratio between the radius of the
interested region and that of the imaging region, the axial error
and the image energy to evaluate the quality of reconstructed
images. To date, however, none of the existing methods
provides a universally acceptable solution to the number of
pixels in a reconstructed ET images. In fact, existing methods
have many limitations. First, the methods to determine the
number of pixels are often subjective. Second, the objects
under evaluation are binary images or gray-scale images.
Third, some prior information such as images error resolution
and duty ratio are considered in the evaluation. The last but
not the least, the evaluation process itself is not objective
enough. For example, a known mesh of pixels is used during
the whole image reconstruction process. In this paper we
propose an objective and robust index to solve the above
problem. Simulation data derived from the finite element
method (FEM) are also given.
II. Principle of ET image reconstruction
The task of ET image reconstruction is to determine the
conductivity distributions, and hence material distributions
over the cross-section based on the electrical measurements.
Without generation, we take a special case of ET, electrical
resistance tomography (ERT), to illustrate the basic principle
of ET image reconstruction. The mathematical representation
of ERT is explained as follows.
Basically, in the two-dimensional case, the relationship
between the spatial distributions of the conductivity σ~ and the
distributions of electric potential ϕ can be derived from
Maxwell’s equation [10], given as Poisson’s equations, shown
as
∇(σ~∇ϕ) = 0 (1)
It is possible to collect the information of the spatial
distributions of the conductivity by a group of measured
boundary voltages. In the mathematical sense, this process is
called as an ERT inverse problem [11], while the problem of
finding the electrical potential and potential differences U
between electrode pairs for a given current injection is called
the forward problem with the distribution of σ~. Based on finite
element method (FEM) [12], the linearized and discrete form
of (1) can be expressed as
ΔM×1U = JM×N •σN×1 (2)
where J is a Jacobian matrix, i.e. the sensitivity distribution
matrix, giving a sensitivity map for each electrode pair, M and
N are the number of measurements and elements (pixels),
respectively. The normalized form of (2) is as (3),
U = Sσ (3)
where U is the normalized voltage vector, S is the Jacobian
matrix of normalized current with respect to normalized
conductivity, i.e., the transducer sensitivity matrix and σ is
the normalized conductivity vector corresponding to the grey
level of pixels for visualization. In the discrete form, the aim
of image reconstruction for ERT is to find the unknown σ
from the known U by using (3 ) , that is
σ = S −1U (4)
However, direct analytical solution for (4) does not exist
since the inverse problem is both nonlinear and ill-posed, little
noise in the measured data could cause large errors in the
estimated conductivity. Consequently, it is necessary to use
numerical techniques to approximate S−1 as accurate as
possible after applying some residual criterion. One efficient
criteria is minimal least error defined as
|| U − Sσ ||22 → min (5)
Equation(5) is used to identify the optimal values of σ .
Many variants of (5) have proposed to solve the ill-posed
problem among which the most used ET image reconstruction
algorithms are the linear back projection (LBP). In the LBP
algorithm the conductivity distributions are assumed to
comprise a number of discrete regions within the measurement
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space such that the conductivity within each region is
constant. According to (4),
σ = STU / ST uλ , st. . uλ = [1,1,...,1] (6)
Equation(6) shows that the grey values of any pixel is
calculated using a weighted form in the algorithm [13]. In this
paper, we use the LBP algorithm for ERT imaging
reconstruction to examine the optimality of space resolutions
of ET images under various numbers of pixels.
III. Proposed method
In this section we introduce the ERT imaging process and
propose an optimal index to determine the number of pixels to
the ERT imaging process.
A. ERT imaging principle
As an example, we apply an ERT system of totally 16
electrodes evenly distributed around a 16-centrimeter-radius
pipe to illustrate the ET imaging process, as shown in Fig.1.
(a) (b)
Figure 1. Illustration of ET imaging process. (a) Scheme of the excitation and
measurement and partitioned units (Pixels) for ERT image reconstruction. (b).
A projection field (in grey) surrounding by a pair of equipotential lines and
boundary.
Fig. 1(a) has shown the distribution of electrodes in our
experiments and the adjacent exciting strategy is used for data
collection. First, the exciting current I is added to electrode
pair (1, 2), and the 15 voltage values of (2, 3), (3, 4) , … , (16,
1) are measured. Secondly, the exciting current is added to (2,
3), and the voltages of (3, 4), (4, 5),…, (1, 2) are measured
from successive pairs of neighboring electrodes and so on.
Finally, the exciting current is added to (16, 1), and the
voltages of (1, 2), (2, 3) , … , (15, 16) are measured from
successive pairs of neighboring electrodes. After excitation
electrode pair is switched 16 times, 16 groups of
measurements are obtained among which two measurements
including excitation electrode pairs need to be discarded due
to the large errors. Thus, 13 groups of measurements in each
excitation except excitation electrode pairs are used for image
construction. Considering the reciprocity of electrode
distributions, total 104 independent values are used to extract
the internal conductivity information [11] [14]. Generally, the
total number of independent measurements is
M = n ( n − 3) / 2 (7)
where n is the number of used measuring electrodes.
To reconstruct a frame of ERT image, the cross-section is
discretized by rectangular or triangular units related to pixels
in the ERT image (see Fig.1 (a)). The cross-section boundary
and any pair of equipotential lines connected to two adjacent
electrodes construct a projection field (see Fig.1 (b)). Each
exaction electrode responds to 16 projection fields over the
entire cross-section, and thus any pixel in the cross-section
must be covered by 16 projection fields respectively from 16
different exaction electrodes. Consequently, the 16 measured
values of the pixel directly result in its grey by LBP of (6) or
other image algorithms. To obtain an ET image of high
resolution the number of pixels has to be determined in
advance. If there is not prior information, an objective method
to determine the number of pixels is greatly desire. We thus
propose the following index to solve this problem.
B. An optimal index in imaging process
Consider a pixel dataset M = [ x 1 , x 2 ,..., x n ] ∈ R d × n , where
each column of M, xi = ( x i1 , x i 2 ,..., x id ) T ∈ R d , is a singleton
data object in a d-dimensional data space. For example, when
the number of electrodes is 16, d=16.
Let ε max and ε min be the maximal and minimal distances
between any pair of data objects in M respectively
and ε ∈ [ε min , ε max ] . We take a number of equidistant breaking
points ε 1 , ε 2 ,...., ε s −1 , ε s from ε 1 to ε s to partition ε ,
ε 1 = ε min , ε s = ε max , where s is the number of breaking points.
A breaking point s k can be characterized as
ε k = ε1 + (k −1)Δ, k = 1,2,...,s (8)
where Δ is the distance between any two adjacent breaking
points. Let N ε k ( x j ) be the subset of the data objects in the
ε k -neighborhood of x j , k = 1,2,...,s; j = 1,2,...,n . Orders all
subsets of x j into three sets of grids: D(s, ε k ), s = 1, 2, 3,
such that the density of any subset in D(t, ε k ) is greater than
any other subset in D(t+1, ε k ), t = 1, 2. Hereafter, | • | denotes
the number of data objects in the contained set. The optimal
neighborhood size, say GPI, is determined by maximizing the
ratio of |D(1, ε k )| and |D(3, ε k )|; that is,
GPI= arg maxε k {|D(1, ε k )| / |D(3, ε k )|}, (9)
Hereafter GPI is called a general partitioning index (GPI) in
this paper. The two classes of subsets in D(1, ε k ) and D(3,
ε k ) correspond to the centric and margin locations of all
clusters. If ε →ε each data point will have no neighborhood
min
and ε =1O
PT
; while ε →ε , the space will degenerate to a subset. The
max
differences between any pair of subsets will disappear and also
. Consequently, there must be one maximum on (11) at least
ε =1
O
PT
without any additional conditions.
GPI in (9) aims at maximizing grey differences between
investigated objectives and background since the investigated
objectives respond to these pixels whose components have
larger values while the background responds to these pixels
whose components have smaller values.
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 IV. Experiments
In this section we apply a group experiments to test of the
effectiveness of GPI. As compared, we apply the LBP
algorithm to reconstruct these images under various numbers
of pixels based on the same measured data. These experiments
are performed in the ERT sensitiveness fields and analyzed by
space resolution. Here the space resolution refers to the (i) ξ=0.33, GPI=1.05 (j) ξ=0.29, GPI=0.97
relative error of all n pixels (assume as n) in the reconstructed
image as
1 (g - g *j ) (10)
∑
n j
ζ =
n j =1
g *j
where gj is the reference grey degree of the j-th pixel, that is
the real grey value; gj* is the grey value of the j-th pixel in
the reconstructed image, j=1, 2,…, n; ζ is the average of all (k) ξ=0.44, GPI=0.83 (l) ξ=0.38, GPI=0.66
errors of K pixels. This group of experiments is performed in
Comsel 2.3 [16]. The tested original images are two and three
circles with continuously distributed materials, as shown in
Fig. 2(a) and (b).

(m) ξ=0.34, GPI=0.94 (n) ξ=0.39, GPI=1.14

(a) original image (b) original image

(o) ξ=0.25, GPI=5.12 (p) ξ=0.27, GPI=4.97

(c) ξ=0.51, GPI=0.99 (d) ξ=0.30, GPI=2.17

(q) ξ=0.37, GPI=3.92 (r) ξ=0.38, GPI=2.85

(e) ξ=0.28, GPI=3.79 (f) ξ=0.26, GPI=0.39

(s) ξ=0.36, GPI=1.83 (t) ξ=0.42, GPI=2.01

(u) ξ=0.44, GPI=0.64 (v) ξ=0.41, GPI=0.89

(g) ξ=0.45, GPI=1.32 (h) ξ=0.42, GPI=1.61
Figure 2. Original and reconstructed images from LBP under
different GPI values. (a)-(l) shows the reconstructed images by
LBP that responds to the original image of two circles. (m)-(v)
shows that reconstructed images that responds to the original
image of three circles.

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 These circles have the same conductivity and thus should
be shown as the same gray degree. On the other hand, the
background must respond to two kinds of different grey
degrees since there is a class of trail traces at least. We
perform the LBP algorithm with various numbers of pixels
(e.g., grids in the FEM) for image reconstruction, while the
values of GPI are computed to find the maximum. As
compared, the space resolutions of (10) are computed. As the
number of pixels gradually decreases, these images of
different space resolutions are obtained. It can be observed
that GPI and (10) simultaneously attain their optimums,
minimum and maximum. Please note (10) is a subjective
evaluation of space resolution due to dependence of necessary
reference image. Inversely, GPI works without any other
information except the reconstructed image itself.
Consequently, GPI perfectly is an objective evaluation. When
GPI attains its maximum the corresponding number of pixels
is optimal. In fact the trail traces in a reconstructed image of
the maximum of GPI is minimal and the boundary of
investigated objectives (see Fig.2 (e) and (f)). It can visually
be observed that the trail traces in other images whose values
of GPI is far away from the maximum are widely distributed,
and even some circles are incorrectly connected to the same
area. Thus these images shows that GPI can better distinguish
optimal ET images by determination of the optimal number of
pixels.
(a) (b)
Figure 3. Maximums of GPI in reconstructed images under different
numbers of pixels from the LBP algorithms. (a) and (b) responds to the
cases of two and three circles, repectively.
Fig. 3 summarizes the curve of GPI values in the above
two groups of ET images. It can be seen from Fig. 3 that the
two maximums are dominantly larger than other values. Thus
GPI can clearly predict the optimal number of pixels and
evaluate the ET image of the best space resolution. GPI can
represent different physical meanings and can work
objectively without any additional information.
V. CONCLUSION
Preliminary results presented in this paper have indicated
that the proposed index the evaluation of reconstructed images
in electrical tomography and the determination of optimal
number of pixels are objective, comprehensive, and effective.
The area parameters can be used to assess whether the
reconstructed image accurately shows the duty ratio of the
discrete phases in the process being imaged as well as the
sharpness of the edges of the discrete phases. The accuracy of
the distribution of discrete phases in the reconstructed images
can be evaluated using the proposed index. In general, the
proposed index presented is promising and expected to
facilitate further research in electrical tomography.
Acknowledgment
This work is supported by the National Science
Foundation of China under Grant No. 61774014, 60572065,
60772080 and the National Science Foundation of Tianjin
under Grant N0.08JCYBJC13800.
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