Solving Multicolor Discrete Tomography Problems by Using Prior Knowledge

Discrete tomography deals with the reconstruction of discrete sets with given projections relative to a limited number of directions, modeling the situation where a material is studied through x-rays and we desire to reconstruct an image representing the scanned object. In many cases it would be interesting to consider the projections to be related to more than one distinguishable type of cell, called atoms or colors, as in the case of a scan involving materials of different densities, as a bone and a muscle. Unfortunately the general n-color problem with n > 1 is NP-complete, but in this paper we show how several polynomial reconstruction algorithms can be defined by assuming some prior knowledge on the set to be rebuilt. In detail, we study the cases where the union of the colors form a set without switches, a convex polyomino or a convex 8-connected set. We describe some efficient reconstruction algorithms and in a case we give a sufficient condition for uniqueness.