X-ray in-line phase tomography of multimaterial objects

We present a method for phase retrieval from x-ray Fresnel diffraction patterns for multimaterial objects. Previously, homogeneous object assumptions have been used and have been introduced in the Radon domain. Here, we apply prior knowledge in the object domain, which permits the introduction of multiple materials. This is achieved first by a tomographic reconstruction of an attenuation scan and then introduction of the prior followed by a forward projection step to yield the a priori phase maps. The method is applied to the reconstruction of an object of known composition consisting of both soft and hard materials and is shown to perform better than previously proposed algorithms. (c) 2012 Optical Society of America