A Computer Simulation Study for the Digital Processing of Longitudinal Tomograms Obtained with a Zone Plate Camera

Longitudinal tomoplanes characterizing a three-dimensional object distribution suffer from the problem of interference between planes and their information content can be misleading for diagnostic purposes. Techniques for unscrambling linked tomograms are examined and it is demonstrated that matrix inversion generates artifact free tomographic information. This method is perfectly general and has been applied to zone plate coded aperture imaging. For this system the quantum noise limitation has been examined and is relatively independent of the spatial frequency content of the object. Provided sufficient information can be collected, processed reconstructions faithfully represent both high frequency and uniform object distributions.