Iterative Nonlinear Tikhonov Algorithm with Constraints for Electromagnetic Tomography

Low frequency electromagnetic tomography such as the capacitance tomography (ECT) has been proposed for monitoring and mass-gauging of gas-liquid two-phase system under microgravity condition in NASA's future long-term space missions. Due to the ill-posed inverse problem of ECT, images reconstructed using conventional linear algorithms often suffer from limitations such as low resolution and blurred edges. Hence, new efficient high resolution nonlinear imaging algorithms are needed for accurate two-phase imaging. The proposed Iterative Nonlinear Tikhonov Regularized Algorithm with Constraints (INTAC) is based on an efficient finite element method (FEM) forward model of quasi-static electromagnetic problem. It iteratively minimizes the discrepancy between FEM simulated and actual measured capacitances by adjusting the reconstructed image using the Tikhonov regularized method. More importantly, it enforces the known permittivity of two phases to the unknown pixels which exceed the reasonable range of permittivity in each iteration. This strategy does not only stabilize the converging process, but also produces sharper images. Simulations show that resolution improvement of over 2 times can be achieved by INTAC with respect to conventional approaches. Strategies to further improve spatial imaging resolution are suggested, as well as techniques to accelerate nonlinear forward model and thus increase the temporal resolution.