Full-vectorial 3D microwave imaging of sparse scatterers through a multi-task Bayesian compressive sensing approach

Abstract

In this paper, the full-vectorial three-dimensional (3D) microwave imaging (MI) of sparse scatterers is dealt with. Towards this end, the inverse scattering (IS) problem is formulated within the contrast source inversion (CSI) framework and it is aimed at retrieving the sparsest and most probable distribution of the contrast source within the imaged volume. A customized multi-task Bayesian compressive sensing (MT-BCS) method is used to yield regularized solutions of the 3D-IS problem with a remarkable computational efficiency. Selected numerical results on representative benchmarks are presented and discussed to assess the effectiveness and the reliability of the proposed MT-BCS strategy in comparison with other competitive state-of-the-art approaches, as well.