Object-based 3D binary reconstruction from sparse projections in cone beam CT: Comparison of three projection operators

We present herein a level set approach to the X-ray tomography problem with sparse projection data and study the impact of the projection operator on the binary reconstruction accuracy and computation time. The comparison is carried out on three projectors: the Separable Footprint (Trapeze-Trapeze, SF-TT) [3], a classical Raydriven (RD) and a Simplified version of the Distance-Driven (SDD) projector respectively. The performance, are evaluated for each operator, on a binary 3D Shepp-Logan phantom by varying the number of projections from 5 to 13, and considering noise free and noisy cone beam projection data.