A Novel Microwave Tomography System Using a Rotatable Conductive Enclosure

A novel microwave tomography (MWT) setup is proposed wherein a rotatable conductive enclosure is used to generate electromagnetic scattering data that are collected at each static position of the enclosure using a minimal antenna array having as few as only four co-resident elements. The antenna array remains fixed with respect to the target being imaged and only the boundary of the conductive enclosure is rotated. To show that non-redundant scattering data can be generated in this way several 2D transverse magnetic imaging examples are considered using single-frequency synthetic data. For each example, the reconstruction of the complex permittivity profile is compared to that obtained using a homogeneous open-region MWT setup having 16 co-resident antennas. The weighted L₂ -norm total variation multiplicative-regularized Gauss-Newton inversion (MR-GNI) is used for all inversions and for the new MWT setup the data collected at all positions of the conductive enclosure are inverted simultaneously. The quality of images obtained from the two systems is similar, but the advantage of the new configuration is its use of a fixed minimal antenna array which will put less of a burden on the numerical system model.