Registration of the rotation axis in X-ray tomography

There is high demand for efficient, robust and automated routines for tomographic data reduction, particularly for synchrotron data. Registration of the rotation axis in data processing is a critical step affecting the quality of the reconstruction and is not easily implemented with automation. Existing methods for calculating the center of rotation have been reviewed and an improved algorithm to register the rotation axis in tomographic data is presented. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using synchrotron-based microtomography data on geological samples with and without artificial reduction of the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method improves the reconstruction quality by correcting both the tilting error and the translational offset of the rotation axis. The limitation of this promising method is also discussed.