Planar array magnetic induction tomography further improvement

Purpose:

Magnetic induction tomography (MIT) is a tomographic imaging technique with a wide range of potential industrial applications. Planar array MIT is a convenient setup but unable to access freely from the entire periphery as it only collects measurements from one surface, so it remains challenging given the limited data. This study aims to assess the use of sparse regularization methods for accurate position and depth detection in planar array MIT.

Design/methodology/approach:

The most difficult challenges in MIT are to solve the inverse and forward problems. The inversion of planar MIT is severely ill-posed due to limited access data. Thus, this paper posed a total variation (TV) problem and solved it efficiently with the Split Bregman formulation to overcome this difficulty. Both isotropic and anisotropic TV formulations are compared to Tikhonov regularization with experimental MIT data.

Findings:

The results show that Tikhonov method failed or underestimated the object position and depth. Both isotropic and anisotropic TV led to accurate recovery of depth and position.

Originality/value:

There are numerous potential applications for planar array MIT where access to the materials under testing is restrict. Sparse regularization methods are a promising approach to improving depth detection for limited MIT data.