An implicit radial basis function based reconstruction approach to electromagnetic shape tomography

In a reconstruction problem for subsurface tomography (modeled by the Helmholtz equation), we formulate a novel reconstruction scheme for shape and electromagnetic parameters from scattered field data, based upon an implicit Hermite interpolation based radial basis function (RBF) representation of the boundary curve. An object's boundary is defined implicitly as the zero level set of an RBF fitted to boundary parameters comprising the locations of few points on the curve (the RBF centers) and the normal vectors at those points. The electromagnetic parameter reconstructed is the normalized (w.r.t. the squared ambient wave number) difference of the squared wave numbers between the object and the ambient half-space. The objective functional w.r.t. boundary and electromagnetic parameters is set up and required Frechet derivatives are calculated. Reconstructions using a damped Tikhonov regularized Gauss-Newton scheme for this almost rank-deficient problem are presented for 2D test cases of subsurface landmine-like dielectric single and double-phantom objects under noisy data conditions. The double phantom example demonstrates the capability of our present scheme to separate out the two objects starting from an initial single-object estimate. The present implicit-representation scheme thus enjoys the advantages (and conceptually overcomes the respective disadvantages) of current implicit and explicit representation approaches by allowing for topological changes of the boundary curve, while having few unknowns respectively. In addition, the Hermite interpolation based RBF representation is a powerful method to represent shapes in three dimensions, thus conceptually paving the way for the algorithm to be used in 3D.