Digital neutron image enhancement based on total variation-based ℓ0 minimization

For the digital neutron radiography applications, low contrast is inevitable due to the neutron and photon statistics limited or high transmission (and low attenuation) in the sample. In this paper, we introduce a total variation-based ℓ0 minimization model and solve it by an alternating minimization approach. The proposed model is applied to base & detail decomposition for the dynamic range modification and detail magnification. Experimental results on several real neutron images are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.