Conference article

Objects having a ?attened geometry, such as those encountered in heritage, have always been dif?cult to be analysed with conventional X-ray tomography methods due to their anisotropic morphology. To overcome the limitations of classical tomography for such samples, we envisage a new imaging modality based on Compton scattering. While Compton effect is usually considered as noise in tomography, in Compton scattering tomography the conditions are set such that this becomes the imaging agent of the image formation process. Our interests are, ?rstly, to avoid the relative rotation between the object, the source and the detector, and secondly, to be able to obtain in-depth data even when the sample is supported by some deep or dense material by exploiting only back-scattered photons. To replace the information provided by multiple projections angles in classical tomography, we make use of the relation between the energy loss of the scattered photons and its scattering angle, the Compton equation. Modelling of this new modality, image formation and object reconstruction through a ?ltered back-projection algorithm of a Radon transform on a half-space is presented. The feasibility of this concept is supported by numerical simulations.

Radon transform, Compton scattering tomography, Image reconstruction