Discrete Tomography: Reconstruction under periodicity constraints

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of reconstructing binary matrices that are only accessible through few evaluations of their discrete X-rays. Such question is prominently motivated by the demand in material science for developing a tool for the reconstruction of crystalline structures from their images obtained by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. Various approaches have been suggested for solving the general problem of reconstructing binary matrices that are given by their discrete X-rays in a number of directions, but more work have to be done to handle the ill-posedness of the problem. We can tackle this ill-posedness by limiting the set of possible solutions, by using appropriate a priori information, to only those which are reasonably typical of the class of matrices which contains the unknown matrix that we wish to reconstruct. Mathematically, this information is modelled in terms of a class of binary matrices to which the solution must belong. Several papers study the problem on classes of binary matrices on which some connectivity and convexity constraints are imposed. We study the reconstruction problem on some new classes consisting of binary matrices with periodicity properties, and we propose a polynomial-time algorithm for reconstructing these binary matrices from their orthogonal discrete X-rays.