Microlocal Analysis of $d$-Plane Transform on the Euclidean Space

Abstract

We study the basic properties of the $d$-plane transform on the Euclidean space as a Fourier integral operator and its application to the microlocal analysis of streaking artifacts in its filtered back-projection. The $d$-plane transform is defined by integrals of functions on the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space over all the $d$-dimensional planes, where $0<d<n$. This maps functions on the Euclidean space to those on the affine Grassmannian $G(d,n)$. This is said to be X-ray transform if $d=1$ and Radon transform if $d=n-1$. When $n=2$ the X-ray transform is thought to be measurements of computed tomography (CT) scanners. In this paper we obtain a concrete expression of the canonical relation between the $d$-plane transform and the quantitative properties of the filtered back-projection of the product of the images of the $d$-plane transform. The FBP of the product is related to the metal streaking artifacts of CT images. Our result is a generalization of recent results of Park, Choi, and Seo [Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 70 (2017), pp. 2191--2217] and Palacios, Uhlmann, and Wang [SIAM J. Math. Anal., 50 (2018), pp. 4914--4936] for the X-ray transform on the plane.