Reconstruction of piecewise constant functions from X-ray data

Abstract

We show that on a two-dimensional compact nontrapping Riemannian manifold with strictly convex boundary, a piecewise constant function can be recovered from its integrals over geodesics. We adapt the injectivity proof which uses variations through geodesics to recover the function and we improve this result when the manifold is simple and the function is constant on tiles with geodesic edges, showing that the Jacobi fields of these variations are sufficient. We give also explicit formulas for the values near the boundary. We finally study the stability of the reconstruction method.