An interesting feature of the radon transform Original Research Article

It is shown that the reconstructed image in two-dimensional, parallel beam tomography has an imaginary component which, while zero for perfect data, is of necessity nonzero with real world data. The imaginary component can be used in at least two ways. The first is as an indicator function of the efficacy of corrective measures taken to correct flaws in the original data or in the processing technique. The second is as an essential ingredient in the many complex number operations that are used to process noisy data: crosscorrelations, autocorrelations, spectral analyses, and so forth.