Artifacts in the inversion of the broken ray transform in the plane

Abstract

We study the integral transform over a general family of broken rays in $\mathbb{R}^2$. It is natural for broken rays to have conjugate points, for example, when they are reflected from a curved boundary. If there are conjugate points, we show that the singularities cannot be recovered from local data and therefore artifacts arise in the reconstruction. We apply these conclusions to two examples, the V-line Radon transform and the parallel ray transform. In each example, a detailed discussion of the local and global recovery of singularities is given and we perform numerical experiments to illustrate the results.