Finding needles in a haystack (Q2225658)

A multicurve \(r\) in \(\mathbb{R}^2\) is a finite set of differentiable curves \(r_j\) with finite length and such that they do not intersect each other in open arc. \(r\) is regular if it verifies some standard characteristics, among others not to be self-intersecting or to be parametrized by arc-length on a finite closed interval. The trace \(Tr(r)\) of \(r\) is the set of points that are in the range of \(r\). Let us consider a circle rounding \(r\) and \(u_{\alpha}\) a parametrization of the circle. The masking function \(M_r:\mathbb{R}^2\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) of \(r\) assigns the following number to any \(x\in \mathbb{R}^2\): \[ M_r(x)=\int_0^{\pi} \mu[Tr(r) \cap l(x,u_{\alpha})]\, d\alpha, \] where \(l(x,u_{\alpha})\) is the line through the point \(x\) with direction \(u_{\alpha}\), and \(\mu[\cdot]\) is the counting measure. Let \(r\) be a regular multicurve made of pieces of curves of class \(C^{\infty}\). The authors prove that the non-degenerate segments contained in \(Tr(r)\) can be reconstructed if the masking function is given on any rounding circle (Theorem 4.1). This implies that every segment of the piecewise \(C^{\infty}\) boundary of a convex domain \(D\) is determined by the visual angle function of \(D\) given on a surrounding circle (Corollary 4.2).