Histogram Tomography

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'histogram tomography,' a novel approach for reconstructing higher-dimensional and spectrum-based data in tomographic imaging, enabling fewer rays and revealing null spaces in integral transforms.

Contribution

It develops the concept of histogram tomography for scalar, vector, and tensor data, providing reconstruction methods and analyzing null spaces in related integral transforms.

Findings

Histogram bins correspond to level set reconstructions.

Moments of distributions relate to powers of the unknown function.

Null space characterization for strain distributions in diffraction data.

Abstract

In many tomographic imaging problems the data consist of integrals along lines or curves. Increasingly we encounter "rich tomography" problems where the quantity imaged is higher dimensional than a scalar per voxel, including vectors tensors and functions. The data can also be higher dimensional and in many cases consists of a one or two dimensional spectrum for each ray. In many such cases the data contain not just integrals along rays but the distribution of values along the ray. If this is discretized into bins we can think of this as a histogram. In this paper we introduce the concept of "histogram tomography". For scalar problems with histogram data this holds the possibility of reconstruction with fewer rays. In vector and tensor problems it holds the promise of reconstruction of images that are in the null space of related integral transforms. For scalar histogram tomography problems we show how bins in the histogram correspond to reconstructing level sets of function, while moments of the distribution are the x-ray transform of powers of the unknown function. In the vector case we give a reconstruction procedure for potential components of the field. We demonstrate how the histogram longitudinal ray transform data can be extracted from Bragg edge neutron spectral data and hence, using moments, a non-linear system of partial differential equations derived for the strain tensor. In x-ray diffraction tomography of strain the transverse ray transform can be deduced from the diffraction pattern the full histogram transverse ray transform cannot. We give an explicit example of distributions of strain along a line that produce the same diffraction pattern, and characterize the null space of the relevant transform.