Choquet Integral-based ERT Imaging Fusion for Various Exciting Patterns

Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) is an advanced imaging method due to its advantages of non-radiation, rapid-response and low-cost. Compared with other imaging technology such as computed tomography (CT), ERT imaging process is of high temporal resolution, but its spatial resolution is limited to the so-called “soft-field” effect and ill-posedness. In ERT, electrical currents are excited through electrodes around the object field and the voltages between the rest electrodes are measured to reconstruct image of the resistivity distribution within object field. Commonly, the adjacent exciting and adjacent measuring pattern is always adopted in ERT, i.e., the excited current is injected through a couple of adjacent electrodes and the voltages are measured between adjacent electrodes. As a result, the voltages measurements are far fewer than the pixels of reconstruction image, termed as ill-posedness. To overcome this problem, eight exciting patterns were employed in this paper to obtain more measurements containing information from different angles around object field. According to three characteristics of these measurements, Choquet integral (CI) method was used to fuse and select measurements optimally. The results of simulations and experiments indicated that the proposed method in this paper can improve the quality of reconstructed images.