Uniqueness regions under sets of generic projections in discrete tomography

In Discrete Tomography, objects are reconstructed by means of their projections along certain directions. It is known that, for any given lattice grid, special sets of four valid projections exist that ensure uniqueness of reconstruction in the whole grid. However, in real applications, some physical or mechanical constraints could prevent the use of such theoretical uniqueness results, and one must employ projections fitting some further constraints. It turns out that global uniqueness cannot be guaranteed, even if, in some special areas included in the grid, uniqueness might be still preserved. In this paper we address such a question of local uniqueness. In particular, we wish to focus on the problem of characterizing, in a sufficiently large lattice rectangular grid, the sub-region which is uniquely determined under a set S of generic projections. It turns out that the regions of local uniqueness consist of some curious twisting of rectangular areas. This deserves a special interest even from the pure combinatorial point of view, and can be explained by means of numerical relations among the entries of the employed directions.