Horizontal drift correction by trajectory of sinogram centroid fitting for laboratory x-ray nanotomography

X-ray nanotomography has become an important analysis tool in a wide range of fields. However, the imaging quality is often affected by drift from focal spot movement and mechanical instability. An improved horizontal drift correction method for X-ray nanotomography based on trajectory of sinogram centroid (TSC) is proposed. This method requires neither auxiliary marks nor additional projections. A sliding window TSC fitting method is utilized. The sum of the squared errors (SSE) is calculated between the trajectory and standard sinusoidal curve. The one corresponding to the minimum SSE is chosen to obtain the horizontal drift from the original TSC, which is then used to align the projections. The proposed method is evaluated by both simulation results of the Shepp-Logan phantom and nanotomographic results of the honeybee mouthpart. The results show that this method can quickly and effectively correct the projection horizontal drift.