Target identification of coated objects

We consider the three-dimensional electromagnetic inverse scattering problem of determining information about a coated object from a knowledge of the electric far-field patterns corresponding to time harmonic incident plane waves at fixed frequency. We assume that the obstacle is either a perfect conductor coated by a thin dielectric layer or a dielectric coated by a thin layer of a highly conducting material, i.e., the coated portion of the boundary is modeled by either an impedance boundary condition or a conductive boundary condition. No a priori assumption is made on the connectivity of the scattering obstacle nor on the extent of the coating, i.e., the object can be fully coated, partially coated, or not coated at all. We present an algorithm based on the linear sampling method for reconstructing the shape of the scattering obstacle together with an estimate of either the surface impedance or surface conductivity. Numerous numerical examples are given showing the efficaciousness of our method.