Four-dimensional electrical capacitance tomography imaging using experimental data

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a relatively mature non-invasive imaging technique that attempts to map dielectric permittivity of materials. ECT has become a promising monitoring technique in industrial process tomography especially in fast flow visualization. One of the most challenging tasks in further development of ECT for real applications are the computational aspects of the ECT imaging. Recently, 3D ECT has gained interest because of its potential to generate volumetric images. Computation time of image reconstruction in 3D ECT makes it more difficult for real time applications. In this paper we present a robust and computationally efficient 4D image reconstruction algorithm applied to real ECT data. The method takes advantage of the temporal correlation between 3D ECT frames to reconstruct movies of dielectric maps. Image reconstruction results are presented for the proposed algorithms for experimental ECT data of a rapidly moving object.