A Bayesian approach for CT reconstruction with defect detection for subsea pipelines

Subsea pipelines can be inspected via 2D cross-sectional x-ray computed tomography (CT). Traditional reconstruction methods produce an image of the pipe’s interior that can be post-processed for detection of possible defects. In this paper we propose a novel Bayesian CT reconstruction method with built-in defect detection. We decompose the reconstruction into a sum of two images; one containing the overall pipe structure, and one containing defects, and infer the images simultaneously in a Gibbs scheme. Our method requires that prior information about the two images is very distinct, i.e. the first image should contain the large-scale and layered pipe structure, and the second image should contain small, coherent defects. We demonstrate our methodology with numerical experiments using synthetic and real CT data from scans of subsea pipes in cases with full and limited data. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in various data settings, with reconstruction quality comparable to existing techniques, while also providing defect detection with uncertainty quantification.