"Blind" shape reconstruction from experimental data

Abstract

A method for reconstructing the shape of a bounded impenetrable object from measured scattered field data is presented. The reconstruction algorithm is, in principle, the same as that used before for reconstructing the conductivity of a penetrable object and uses the fact that for high conductivity the skin depth of the scatterer is small, in which case the only meaningful information produced by the algorithm is the boundary of the scatterer. A striking increase in efficiency is achieved by incorporating into the algorithm the fact that for large conductivity, the contrast is dominated by a large positive imaginary part. This fact together with the knowledge that the scatterer is constrained in some test domain constitute the only a priori information about the scatterer that is used. There are no other implicit assumptions about the location, connectivity, convexity, or boundary conditions. The method is shown to successfully reconstruct the shape of an object from experimental scattered field data in a blind test.