A Process to Colorize and Assess Visualizations of Noisy X-Ray Computed Tomography Hyperspectral Data of Materials with Similar Spectral Signatures

Dimension reduction techniques have frequently been used to summarize information from high dimensional hyperspectral data, usually done in effort to classify or visualize the materials contained in the hyperspectral image. The main challenge in applying these techniques to Hyperspectral Computed Tomography (HCT) data is that if the materials in the field of view are of similar composition then it can be difficult for a visualization of the hyperspectral image to differentiate between the materials. We propose novel alternative methods of preprocessing and summarizing HCT data in a single colorized image and novel measures to assess desired qualities in the resultant colored image, such as the contrast between different materials and the consistency of color within the same object. Proposed processes in this work include a new majority-voting method for multi-level thresholding, binary erosion, median filters, PAM clustering for grouping pixels into objects (of homogeneous materials) and mean/median assignment along the spectral dimension for representing the underlying signature, UMAP or GLMs to assign colors, and quantitative coloring assessment with developed measures. Strengths and weaknesses of various combinations of methods are discussed. These results have the potential to create more robust material identification methods from HCT data that has wide use in industrial, medical, and security-based applications for detection and quantification, including visualization methods to assist with rapid human interpretability of these complex hyperspectral signatures.