A Hybrid Quantitative Method for Inverse Scattering of Multiple Dielectric Objects

A hybrid method is proposed to locate the boundaries and determine the dielectric constants of multiple homogeneous scatterers by postprocessing the results of the linear sampling method (LSM). The hybrid method is composed of three steps combining the capabilities of the LSM, the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm, and the generalized multipole technique (GMT). Initially, a new measure of the noise level of the multistatic response (MSR) matrix is proposed. Subsequently, the LSM is applied using the Tikhonov regularization. Then, the scattered field is back-propagated into the investigation domain using the GMT, where in order to ensure the stability, a MUSIC-based approach is exploited to determine the optimum reconstructing multipole sources. The case of limited scattered field data is also addressed by introducing a modification of the Papoulis-Gerchberg algorithm (PGA). Finally, the boundary and the dielectric constant of each scatterer are obtained simultaneously by solving an inverse boundary value problem through an optimization. The proposed hybrid approach is capable of efficiently approximating the dielectric constant of multiple homogeneous dielectric scatterers in a parallel manner. The effectiveness of the proposed method and the accuracy of the solutions are demonstrated by applying the method to both numerical and measured data.