Linear Processing of X-ray Scattering Patterns with Missing Pixels

X-ray scattering patterns from emerging single particle experiments have commonly many missing or contaminated pixels. This complicates different analyses including projections on Fourier or other basis functions (for noise suppression, compression, feature extraction, or retrieval of real-space patterns), as they require integration over all pixels. Here, we derive alternative formulations for Discrete Fourier Transform and a common orthogonal basis by explicit consideration of missing pixels and finite size. Such linear formulations exclude the nonlinear distortion that would be caused by multiplication of the complete scattering pattern with the mask function. Contrary to nonlinear and non-convex phase retrieval optimizations, such reduced-dimension formulations can be used to fully enforce the constraints and to retrieve unknown intensities in a linear fashion. Applications are demonstrated for some typical cases, and extensions to more general cases are discussed.