A single-scan dual-energy low-dose cone-beam CT (CBCT) imaging technique that exploits a multi-slit filter is proposed in this paper. The multi-slit filter installed between the x-ray source and the scanned object is reciprocated during a scan. The x-ray beams through the slits would generate relatively low-energy x-ray projection data, while the filtered beams would make high-energy projection data. An iterative image reconstruction algorithm that uses an adaptive-steepest-descent method to minimize image total-variation under the constraint of data fidelity was applied to reconstructing the image from the low-energy projection data. Since the high-energy projection data suffer from a substantially high noise level due to the beam filtration, we have developed a new algorithm that exploits the joint sparsity between the low- and high-energy CT images for image reconstruction of the high-energy CT image. The proposed image reconstruction algorithm uses a gradient magnitude image (GMI) of the low-energy CT image by regularizing the difference of GMIs of the low- and high-energy CT images to be minimized. The feasibility of the proposed technique has been demonstrated by the use of various phantoms in the experimental CBCT setup. Furthermore, based on the proposed dual-energy imaging, a material differentiation was performed and its potential utility has been shown. The proposed imaging technique produced promising results for its potential application to a low-dose single-scan dual-energy CBCT.

In this paper, we present a novel edge-directed upsampling method based on radial basis function (RBF) interpolation. In order to remove artifacts such as blurred edges or blocking effects, we suggest a nonlinear method capable of taking edge information into account. The resampling evaluation is determined according to the edge orientation. The proposed scheme is as simple to implement as linear methods but it demonstrates improved visual quality by preserving the edge features better than the classical linear interpolation methods. The algorithm is compared with some well-known linear schemes as well as recently developed nonlinear schemes. The resulting images demonstrate the new algorithm's ability to magnify an image while preserving the edge features.