Practical Multi-Mesh Registration for Few-View Poly-Chromatic X-Ray Inspection

Abstract Accurate 3D mesh registration is essential in many industrial applications of X-ray imaging, as it allows quality assessment and inspection of manufactured objects. Conventional methods rely mainly on time-consuming and expensive X-ray computed tomography (X-CT) or ancillary camera systems. Instead, we propose a novel approach for efficient 3D multi-mesh registration in few-view industrial X-ray imaging scenarios. Our approach harnesses the capabilities of CAD-ASTRA, an X-ray mesh projector, compatible with the ASTRA toolbox and popular GPU libraries such as CuPy and PyTorch, for the simulation of X-ray projec tions from a known object surface mesh. As a differentiable program, CAD-ASTRA allows iterative improvement of the objects’ position in space by back-propagation of a differentiable measure of the projection error. The potential of this approach is demonstrated through tests on simultaneous multiple object registration in a poly-chromatic imaging, even in cases where the spectral characteristics of the imaging system are unknown. Results from a diverse set of real experiments highlight the efficacy of mesh registration, achieving successful registrations even when only two projections at a 10$$^\circ $$ angle relative to the scanning system center are available. The mesh projector facilitates resource-efficient registration in industrial applications with few viewpoints, thereby reducing the demand for resources and eliminating the need for X-CT reconstruction.