Comparative Study of Some Population-Based Optimization Algorithms on Inverse Scattering of a Two-Dimensional Perfectly Conducting Cylinder in Dielectric Slab Medium

The application of four techniques for the shape reconstruction of a 2-D metallic cylinder buried in dielectric slab medium by measured the scattered fields outside is studied in the paper. The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique is employed for electromagnetic analyses for both the forward and inverse scattering problems, while the shape reconstruction problem is transformed into optimization one during the course of inverse scattering. Then, four techniques including asynchronous particle swarm optimization (APSO), PSO, dynamic differential evolution (DDE) and self-adaptive DDE (SADDE) are applied to reconstruct the location and shape of the 2-D metallic cylinder for comparative purposes. The statistical performances of these algorithms are compared. The results show that SADDE outperforms PSO, APSO and DDE in terms of the ability of exploring the optima. However, these results are considered to be indicative and do not generally apply to all optimization problems in electromagnetics.