The Incident Field Optimization Method for the Electromagnetic Inverse Problems

Abstract

In this letter, an incident field optimization (IO) method integrated with contrast source inversion (CSI) method and multiplicative regularized CSI (MR-CSI) method is proposed to deal with the electromagnetic inverse problems. For the conventional iterative inversion methods, the incident field is a prior knowledge and is usually obtained by the calibration process. Through the synthetic data experiments, it can be found that a small distortion of the incident field has little impact on the inversion results, but a high distortion will lead to fault inversion results or no convergence. In this letter, the incident field optimal factor, being updated during the iterative process, is introduced into the CSI and MR-CSI method, named as IO-CSI and MR–IO–CSI. The new methods have good inversion performance even with high incident field distortion. The proposed methods are applied to the Fresnel experiment data directly without the calibration procedure. Both the single-frequency and multifrequency inversion experiments demonstrate that the IO-CSI and MR–IO–CSI method can achieve good inversion results, indicating the method’s practical applicability.