Influence of the description of the scattering matrix on permittivity reconstruction with a quantitative imaging...

This paper focuses on the role of polarization-and more specifically, the effect of its selection-in 3D quantitative imaging obtained from scattered field measurements. Although polarization is now commonly used in linear imaging procedures (when unknowns are linked by a linear relationship to the measured signal), the influence of polarization choice is generally ignored in nonlinear imaging problems. In this paper, we propose a formulation to obtain the 3D permittivity map, by a nonlinear imaging procedure, from the scattering matrix. This allows one to select, from the same data set, the desired polarization case as input data for the imaging algorithm. We present a study of the influence of the input data polarization choice on the reconstructed permittivity map. This work shows that a suitable basis choice for the description of the scattering matrix and an appropriate selection of the element of this scattering matrix can greatly improve imaging results.