3D image of an assembly of rice grains

3D reconstruction of an assembly of rice grains. The image was acquired on the collaborative microtomography platform at Laboratoire Navier (http://navier.enpc.fr).

Ordinary, long-grain rice is poured in a plastic container, 50mm in diameter. The average length of the grains is about 6.5 mm.

The X-ray source is a Hamamatsu L10801 X-ray source (maximum voltage: 230V, maximum current: 1mA). Combined with the the Paxscan Varian 2520V flat-panel X-ray imager (1536x1920 pixels, pixel pitch 127µm), this setup leads to a voxel size of approx. 0.030mm. The specimen was scanned at 100kV and 300µA with an imager frame-rate of 6 images per second. To reduce noise, 12 radiographs were averaged to produce one projection; the total number of projections was 1440.

3D reconstruction was carried out using standard tools developed by RX Solutions France. Contrast, resolution and signal-to-noise ratio were all excellent, so that the most basic reconstruction procedure resulted in very high quality 3D images.

The dataset is provided as a set of 689 TIFF images, 1747×1751 pixels. It is used as illustrative material for a series of posts called “Orientation correlations among rice grains” on my blog (see related identifiers below).