Within the last years, 3D-CT has become more and more established for industrial use and lot of progress has been made in fast CT reconstruction. This enabled the design of CT systems performing a scan in less than 30 seconds. Therefore, the scan time of a fast CT system can be in the same range as the production time of a wide range of products, e.g. light metal castings. However, having overcome the hardware challenge does not mean that implementing an inline CT in production can be realized without having to overcome new obstacles. Performing a CT scan in such a short time results in a dramatically reduced number of X-ray photons used for reconstruction compared to a normal CT scan. This leads to a comparatively bad SNR in the reconstruction and so to a noticeably reduced contrast resolution. This loss in image quality even occurs when high power X-ray tubes are used. At the same time, the aforementioned tubes limit the spatial resolution due to their big focal spot. As a result of these physical effects, it is not sufficient to simply strive for an increased calculation speed in an existing standard inspection software in order to perform meaningful analyses and measurements within a shorter time frame. Instead, a fully automated in-line inspection software solution is needed, including automated pass/fail decisions and equipped with specially developed algorithms, which can deal with the bad SNR. Furthermore, use in an industrial setting necessitates for such a SW to be fast, scalable, repeatable and reliable as well. Finally, a reasonable approach requires that an end-user will be able to set up and modify the analyses and measuring plans by himself. Only then will an in-line CT become convenient and attractive enough to be accepted by industry for a wide range of use in a production environment.
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