Structure-Aware Sparse-View X-ray 3D Reconstruction

X-ray known for its ability to reveal internal structures of objects is expected to provide richer information for 3D reconstruction than visible light. Yet existing NeRF algorithms overlook this nature of X-ray leading to their limitations in capturing structural contents of imaged objects. In this paper we propose a framework Structure-Aware X-ray Neural Radiodensity Fields (SAX-NeRF) for sparse-view X-ray 3D reconstruction. Firstly we design a Line Segment-based Transformer (Lineformer) as the backbone of SAX-NeRF. Linefomer captures internal structures of objects in 3D space by modeling the dependencies within each line segment of an X-ray. Secondly we present a Masked Local-Global (MLG) ray sampling strategy to extract contextual and geometric information in 2D projection. Plus we collect a larger-scale dataset X3D covering wider X-ray applications. Experiments on X3D show that SAX-NeRF surpasses previous NeRF-based methods by 12.56 and 2.49 dB on novel view synthesis and CT reconstruction. https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/SAX-NeRF