Spatial resolution and image processing for pinhole camera-based X-ray fluorescence imaging: a simulation study

Spatial resolution and image-processing methods for full-field X-ray fluorescence(FF-XRF)imaging using X-ray pinhole cameras were studied using Geant4simulations with different geometries and algorithms for image reconstruction.The main objectives were:(1)calculating the quantum efficiency curves of specific cameras,(2)studying the relationships between the spatial resolution and the pinhole diameter,magnification,and camera binning value,and(3)comparing image-processing methods for pinhole camera systems.Several results were obtained using a point and plane source as the X-ray fluorescence emitter and an array of 100×100 silicon pixel detectors as the X-ray camera.The quantum efficiency of a back-illuminated deep depletion(BI-DD)structure was above 30%for the XRF energies in the 0.8–9 keV range,with the maximum of 93.7%at 4 keV.The best spatial resolution of the pinhole camera was 24.7μm and 31.3 lp/mm when measured using the profile function of the point source,with the diameter of 20μm,magnification of 3.16,and camera bin of 1.A blind deconvolution algorithm with Gaussian filtering performed better than the Wiener filter and Richardson iterative methods on FF-XRF images,with the signal-to-noise ratio of 7.81 dB and improved signalto-noise ratio of 7.24 dB at the diameter of 120μm,magnification of 1.0,and camera bin of 1.

Improvement of Camera Calibration Accuracy Based on Periodic Arrangement Characteristics of Calibration Target Pattern

Conventional camera calibration that employs calibration targets is a commonly used method to acquire a camera’s intrinsic and/or extrinsic parameters. The calibration targets are usually designed as periodic arrays of simple high-contrast patterns that provide highly accurate world coordinate system points and the corresponding image pixel coordinate system points. The existing pixel coordinate extraction algorithms can reach a sub-pixel level; however, they treat each single pattern in one image as an independent individual, which makes it difficult to further improve extraction accuracy. In this paper, a novel method is proposed by utilizing the periodic arrangement characteristics of the calibration target pattern as a global constraint to improve the calibration accuracy. Based on a camera’s pinhole model, the intersection point of two fitted curves is used as an optimized pixel point to replace the initial one. Following the pixel coordinate optimization procedures, experiments were performed using real data from a 3D laser line scanner and a dynamic precision calibration target. Our results show that the relative errors of camera homography matrix elements obtained by the proposed optimization method were reduced compared with the commonly used method. The average coordinate measurement accuracy can be improved by nearly 0.05 mm. It is shown that the proposed optimization method can enhance the camera calibration accuracy, especially when the extracted pixels are of poorer precision. © 2017 Tianjin University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

The beam-based calibration of an X-ray pinhole camera at SSRF

A pinhole camera for imaging X-ray synchrotron radiation from a dipole magnet is now in operation at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility （SSRF） storage ring.The electron beam size is derived by unfolding the radiation image and the point spread function （PSF） with deconvolution techniques.The performance of the pinhole is determined by the accuracy of the PSF measurement.This article will focus on a beam-based calibration scheme to measure the PSF system by varying the beam images with different quadrupole settings and fitting them with the corresponding theoretical beam sizes.Applying this method at SSRF,the PSF value of the pinhole is revised from 37 to 44μm.The deviation in beam size between the theoretical value and the measured value isminimized to 4% after calibration.This optimization allows us to observe the horizontal disturbance due to injection down to as small as 0.5μm.