Title: Lose The Views: Limited Angle CT Reconstruction via Implicit Sinogram Completion,
Abstract: Computed Tomography (CT) reconstruction is a fundamental component to a wide
variety of applications ranging from security, to healthcare. The classical
techniques require measuring projections, called sinograms, from a full
180$^\circ$ view of the object. This is impractical in a limited angle
scenario, when the viewing angle is less than 180$^\circ$, which can occur due
to different factors including restrictions on scanning time, limited
flexibility of scanner rotation, etc. The sinograms obtained as a result, cause
existing techniques to produce highly artifact-laden reconstructions. In this
paper, we propose to address this problem through implicit sinogram completion,
on a challenging real world dataset containing scans of common checked-in
luggage. We propose a system, consisting of 1D and 2D convolutional neural
networks, that operates on a limited angle sinogram to directly produce the
best estimate of a reconstruction. Next, we use the x-ray transform on this
reconstruction to obtain a "completed" sinogram, as if it came from a full
180$^\circ$ measurement. We feed this to standard analytical and iterative
reconstruction techniques to obtain the final reconstruction. We show with
extensive experimentation that this combined strategy outperforms many
competitive baselines. We also propose a measure of confidence for the
reconstruction that enables a practitioner to gauge the reliability of a
prediction made by our network. We show that this measure is a strong indicator
of quality as measured by the PSNR, while not requiring ground truth at test
time. Finally, using a segmentation experiment, we show that our reconstruction
preserves the 3D structure of objects effectively.