Analysis of Incident Field Modeling and Incident/Scattered Field Calibration Techniques in Microwave Tomography

Imaging with microwave tomography systems requires both the incident field within the imaging domain as well as calibration factors that convert the collected data to corresponding data in the numerical model used for inversion. The numerical model makes various simplifying assumptions, e.g., 2-D versus 3-D wave propagation, which the calibration coefficients are meant to take into account. For an air-based microwave tomography system, we study two types of calibration techniques-incident and scattered field calibration-combined with two different incident field models: a 2-D line-source and an incident field from full-wave 3-D simulation of the tomography system. Although the 2-D line-source approximation does not accurately model incident field in our system, the use of scattered field calibration with the 2-D line-source provides similar or better images to incident and scattered field calibration with an accurate incident field. Thus, if scattered field calibration is used, a simple (but inaccurate) incident field is acceptable for our microwave tomography system. While not strictly generalizable, we expect our methodology to be applicable to most other microwave tomography systems.