Projection drift alignment by acquisition time division for X-ray nanotomography

A markerless projection drift alignment approach for X-ray nanotomography is presented. Drifts in projection from different angles are aligned by applying offsets calculated between successive images after acquisition time division, taking the advantage of the fact that the shorter the time, the less the drift. Involving neither iteration nor parameter selection, it can combine a number of existing image registration techniques and could be adopted for other tomographic imaging techniques. The application of this algorithm has been demonstrated in a laboratory X-ray nanotomography system using single photon detection, in which a standard Siemens star resolution target is initially captured for 2D evaluation and a bamboo stick is used for 3D imaging, leading to sharper image without blur and a much higher resolution.