A new ECT image reconstruction algorithm based on Vision transformer (ViT)

Aiming at the problem of low accuracy of ECT image reconstruction, this paper proposes an ECT image reconstruction algorithm based on Vision Transformer (ViT). ViT is a method that applies the Transformer to the field of image classification, which is characterized by strong long-distance dependency learning ability and strong multi-modal fusion ability compared to CNN. This paper fully utilizes the characteristics of ViT to transform the image reconstruction process of ECT into the classification process of ViT. Here, a method is proposed to use the object field distribution as the image classification label. This method converts a two-dimensional image of the object field distribution into a one-dimensional vector, which is the label vector of the image classification. These vectors and their corresponding reconstructed images obtained by the Landweber algorithm form the sample set of ViT. Extracting a large number of flow pattern samples with various shapes and distributions through COMSOL is used as a training set. After training ViT, this network model is used to infer the labels of the predicted flow patterns. After post-processing this label, the corresponding reconstructed image can be obtained. Finally, simulation experiments are conducted, and the experiments results show that the image errors and correlation coefficients of the reconstructed images obtained through the algorithm in this paper are better than those of Tikhonov algorithm, Landweber algorithm and Long Short-Term Memory Network(LSTM). And this algorithm has better resistance to noise interference than Tikhonov algorithm, Landweber algorithm, and LSTM. This also provides a new approach and means for ECT image reconstruction. •This study proposes an improved image reconstruction algorithm of ECT.•The ECT image reconstruction problem is transformed into a ViT image classification problem.•This method expands the two-dimensional image of the object field into the label of the flow pattern classification.•Many flow patterns were obtained through COMSOL as training set. The ViT model was constructed and trained.•The ViT model is used for inference of the flow patterns labels to obtain the final ECT reconstructed image.