Inverse scattering of two-dimensional dielectric objects buried in a lossy earth using the distorted born iterative method

An efficient inverse-scattering algorithm is developed to reconstruct both the permittivity and conductivity profiles of two-dimensional (2-D) dielectric objects buried in a lossy earth using the distorted Born iterative method (DBIM). In this algorithm, the measurement data are collected on (or over) the air-earth interface for multiple transmitter and receiver locations at single frequency. The nonlinearity due to the multiple scattering of pixels to pixels, and pixels to the air-earth interface has been taken into account in the iterative minimization scheme. At each iteration, a conjugate gradient (CG) method is chosen to solve the linearized problem, which takes the calling number of the forward solver to a minimum. To reduce the CPU time, the forward solver for buried dielectric objects is implemented by the CG method and fast Fourier transform (FFT). Numerous numerical examples are given to show the convergence, stability, and error tolerance of the algorithm.