Auto-focused panoramic dental tomosynthesis imaging with exponential polynomial based sharpness indicators

Abstract

In this paper, we develop an improved auto-focusing capability of a panoramic dental tomosynthesis imager. We propose an auto-focusing algorithm with an efficient sharpness indicator based on exponential polynomials which provides better quantitation of steep gradients than the conventional one based on algebraic polynomials. With its accurate estimation of the sharpness of the reconstructed slices, the proposed method resulted in a better performance of automatically extracting in-focus slices in the dental panoramic tomosynthesis.