Linear distribution imaging of thin metallic cylinders under mutual scattering

In this paper, we address the problem of imaging "thin" metallic cylinders from the knowledge of the electric far-field scattered under the incidence of plane waves. A scattering model based on a multipole expansion accounting for the mutual scattering is introduced and then simplified under the single- and second-order scattering hypotheses. The locations of the unknown cylinders for the inverse problem are described in terms of support of /spl delta/-functions. The performances of a truncated singular value decomposition based linear inversion algorithm in the presence of model errors due to mutual scattering is investigated, by both analytical and numerical arguments, in three different measurement configurations: single-frequency/multiview, multifrequency/single-view, and multifrequency/multiview. The different effects of the angular and frequency diversities are pointed out.