Wagner Fortes, PhD student at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), won a Best Student Paper Award during the 16th IAPR International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery in Nancy, France on 6-8 april 2011 (DGCI 2011). Fortes received the prize for his paper Bounds on the difference between reconstructions in binary tomography. The jury appreciated the paper for its experimental results combined with strong mathematical guarantees on the quality of the results.

Tomography is an image reconstruction technique. It is used in an CT scanner, for example. The similarity of a scanned object with its reconstructed image is never 100 percent. Fortes has described mathematical error bounds on reconstructions for the case that the object is binary, meaning that it has a constant density. With these bounds, one can say what the quality of the reconstructed image is, without having exact knowledge of the scanned object itself. Increasing the number of measurements, taken from multiple angles, improves the quality of the reconstruction, but also increases the harmful radiation dose. With the error bounds, the smallest number of measurements required to obtain a certain image quality can be calculated.

Fortes' research is part of the CWI research group Scientific Computing and Control Theory. Besides the honour of the award, Fortes also received a netbook.