Discrete Tomography: A Historical Overview

Abstract

In this chapter we introduce the topic of discrete tomography and give a brief historical survey of the relevant contributions. After discussing the nature of the basic theoretical problems (those of consistency, uniqueness, and reconstruction) that arise in discrete tomography, we give the details of the classical special case (namely, two-dimensional discrete sets --- i.e.,binary matrices --- and two orthogonal projections) including a polynomial time reconstruction algorithm. We conclude the chapter with a summary of some of the applications of discrete tomography.