Microwave imaging for conducting scatterers by hybrid particle swarm optimization with simulated annealing

In this paper, a microwave imaging technique for reconstructing the shape of two-dimensional perfectly conducting scatterers by means of a stochastic optimization approach is investigated. Based on the boundary condition and the measured scattered field derived by transverse magnetic illuminations, a set of nonlinear integral equations is obtained and the imaging problem is reformulated in to an optimization problem. A hybrid approximation algorithm, called PSO-SA, is developed in this work to solve the scattering inverse problem. In the hybrid algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO) combines global search and local search for finding the optimal results assignment with reasonable time and simulated annealing (SA) uses certain probability to avoid being trapped in a local optimum. The hybrid approach elegantly combines the exploration ability of PSO with the exploitation ability of SA. Reconstruction results are compared with exact shapes of some conducting cylinders; and good agreements with the original shapes are observed.