Microwave Imaging Using Normal Electric-Field Components Inside Metallic Resonant Chambers

A novel 3-D microwave imaging approach performed within a resonant air-filled metallic chamber is introduced and investigated. The new method utilizes the measurements of normal electric-field components at discrete points along the metallic chamber's wall-near the chamber-wall boundary, the normal-field components are dominant, while the tangential components vanish. The inversion algorithm fully incorporates the resonant features of the low-loss chamber. A numerical study is used to quantify the imaging performance of using this technique compared with the traditional unbounded domain imaging. An experimental system is presented where the electric field is collected using 24 antennas distributed in three circumferential layers around an object of interest located inside the circular-cylindrical metallic chamber. For collecting the normal component of the field, two types of linearly polarized antennas are investigated: λ/4 monopole antennas and specially designed reconfigurable antennas (RAs), both projecting perpendicularly out from the chamber walls into the enclosure. The measured data are calibrated and then inverted using a multiplicatively regularized finite-element contrast source inversion algorithm. Using 3-D reconstructions of simple dielectric targets, it is shown that utilizing the RAs improves imaging performance due to a reduction in the modeling error introduced in the inversion algorithm.