A faster measurement strategy of electrical capacitance tomography using less sensing data

Abstract

Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) is a process imaging modality offering real-time cross-sectional permittivity distribution information within a vessel in a noninvasive manner. The common measurement strategy is to take capacitance data of all non-redundant electrode pairs for image reconstruction. In this paper, a novel and faster measurement strategy for ECT using less capacitance data is proposed. The key benefit of this work includes improved sampling speed through significantly reduced number of measurements and smaller dynamic range of the capacitance measurements, which will make the decrease of axial electrode dimension possible. An online image reconstruction algorithm based on Tikhonov regularization and second order Gaussian-Laplace operator is employed to test the image quality. Both simulation and experiment results have shown that the proposed measurement strategy can significantly reduce the measurement number while keeping a comparable or even better image quality compared with the common measurement strategies.