Smoothed L0-Constraint Dictionary Learning for Low-Dose X-Ray CT Reconstruction

The iterative algorithms of computed tomography (CT) reconstruction derived from the dictionary learning (DL) regularization have been developed to make high quality recovery from the under-sampled data acquired by a low dose protocol. However, when they are applied to noisy data with low sampling rate, streaking artifacts and bias tends to appear in early iteration results. Since the dictionary is over-complete, the artifacts and bias can also be represented well by the dictionary, resulting in the reservation of these unexpected structures in the final image. We proposed a smoothed L0 norm-constraint dictionary learning (SL0-DL) algorithm to deal with these unexpected structures. For the proposed algorithm, we introduce smoothed-L0 norm regularization to the objective function. In each iteration process, the intermediate image generated by the DL representation will be smoothed using SL0 norm, and then the smoothed image is used to update the output of this iteration. The raw data from both the numerical simulation and actual CT acquisition are used to test the performances of the proposed SL0-DL method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than other competing algorithms with better noise and artifacts suppression performance while preserving image texture details. And the results show a significant improvement in the quality of the reconstructed image, which demonstrates that the proposed algorithm is really effective.