SPARSE ELECTROMAGNETIC IMAGING USING NONLINEAR LANDWEBER ITERATIONS

Abstract

A scheme for efficiently solving the nonlinear electromagnetic inverse scattering problem on sparse investigation domains is described. The proposed scheme reconstructs the (complex) dielectric permittivity of an investigation domain from fields measured away from the domain itself. Least-squares data misfit between the computed scattered fields, which are expressed as a nonlinear function of the permittivity, and the measured fields is constrained by the L0/L1-norm of the solution. The resulting minimization problem is solved using nonlinear Landweber iterations, where at each iteration a thresholding function is applied to enforce the sparseness-promoting L0/L1-norm constraint. The thresholded nonlinear Landweber iterations are applied to several two-dimensional problems, where the ``measured'' fields are synthetically generated or obtained from actual experiments. These numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and applicability of the proposed scheme in reconstructing sparse profiles with high permittivity values.