Iterative computational imaging method for flow pattern reconstruction based on electrical capacitance tomography

•A new cost function is developed for the ECT imaging.•A potent numerical scheme is devised for solving the proposed cost function.•Numerical comparisons show the performance advantages of the developed algorithm.•The developed algorithm is successfully applied to treat with practical imaging tasks. The electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a promising measurement technique, which tries to reconstruct the permittivity distribution in a measurement domain by solving an inverse problem. Low quality images narrow the applicability of the technique. To address the challenge, a new cost function, which considers model deviation and measurement noises, is devised to model the ECT reconstruction problem. The soft thresholding method and the fast-iterative shrinkage thresholding technique (FIST) are embedded into the iterative split Bregman (ISB) method to solve the devised objective functional. The numerical and experimental results indicate that the proposed ECT imaging technique not only mitigates the ill-posed nature, but also improves the reconstruction quality.