A sparse electromagnetic imaging scheme using nonlinear landweber iterations

Abstract

Development and use of electromagnetic inverse scattering techniques for imagining sparse domains have been on the rise following the recent advancements in solving sparse optimization problems. Existing techniques rely on iteratively converting the nonlinear forward scattering operator into a sequence of linear ill-posed operations (for example using the Born iterative method) and applying sparsity constraints to the linear minimization problem of each iteration through the use of L0/L1-norm penalty term (A. Desmal and H. Bagci, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag, 7, 3878–3884, 2014, and IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., 3, 532–536, 2015). It has been shown that these techniques produce more accurate and sharper images than their counterparts which solve a minimization problem constrained with smoothness promoting L2-norm penalty term. But these existing techniques are only applicable to investigation domains involving weak scatterers because the linearization process breaks down for high values of dielectric permittivity.