<title>Quality enhancement of image-intensified x-ray image</title>

An x-ray image intensified cooled CCD camera (x-ray IICCCDC) with micro-focused x-ray source, is a very powerful tool for objects investigation. We can get inside images of objects non destructively and we can also get magnified images of the objects. We investigate illegal electronic circuits, forged IC chips, etc. by the x-ray IICCCDC. The data depth of each pixel of the image taken by the x-ray IICCCDC is 14 bits. The x-ray IICCCDC is a powerful tool for itself, but the raw images of that are degraded by many factors, a geometrical distortion, lack of uniformity of an x-ray window's material, blurring caused by finite size of the x- ray source, background noise by x-ray scattering, etc. Some of these degradation factors are well defined and the degradation can be restored well, but some of these degradation can not be recovered well. We analyzed the sources of degradation and applied digital image processing techniques to the images of the x-ray IICCCDC to enhance the image quality. Using these digital image processing techniques, the image quality of the x-ray IICCCDC was enhanced substantially.© (1997) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.