Method of non-destructive control of thickness and internal defectivity of the walls of metal pipe

The possibility of an accurate estimation of the pipe wall thickness measured directly from the reconstructed image of the pipe, reconstructed from only a few X-ray projections made in a limited viewing angle, is discussed. Since the effects of radiation scattering and X-ray beam hardening distort up to 50 % of the primary radiation, ignoring these effects leads to blurred images, strong artifacts, and inaccurate sizing. A computerized technique has been developed that takes into account the contribution of scattered radiation and the hardening of the X-ray beam. Iterative Bayesian reconstruction techniques are then used to reconstruct the pipe image using the volumetric and surface-oriented representation of the pipe. Using these methods, the error in estimating the pipe wall thickness can be increased to 300 microns.