Tomography is the process of reconstructing a density distribution from given integrals over sections of the distribution. In our example, we will work with tomography on black and white images. Suppose $x$ be the vector of $n$ pixel densities, with $x_j$ denoting how white pixel $j$ is. Let $y$ be the vector of $m$ line integrals over the image, with $y_i$ denoting the integral for line $i$. We can define a matrix $A$ to describe the geometry of the lines. Entry $A_{ij}$ describes how much of pixel $j$ is intersected by line $i$. Assuming our measurements of the line integrals are perfect, we have the relationship that

However, anytime we have measurements, there are usually small errors that occur. Therefore it makes sense to try to minimize

This is simply an unconstrained least squares problem; something we can readily solve!