Summary: Inspired by binary tomography, we present a measure of directional convexity of binary images combining various properties of the configuration of 0s and 1s in the binary image. The measure can be supported by proper theory, is easy to compute, and as shown in our experiments, behaves intuitively. The measure can be useful in numerous applications of digital image processing and pattern recognition, and especially in binary tomography. We show in detail an application of this latter one, by providing a novel reconstruction algorithm for almost hv-convex binary images. We also present experimental results and mention some of the possiblegeneralizations of the measure.