Electromagnetic Imaging of Anisotropic Objects Using a Self-Attention Perceptual Generative Adversarial Network

Reconstructing high-resolution images of anisotropic targets in microwave imaging remains a challenging problem due to the strong directionality of electromagnetic responses and the inherent nonlinearity of the inverse scattering process. To address these issues, we propose a novel Perceptual Generative Adversarial Network (PGAN) enhanced with a Self-Attention mechanism for anisotropic electromagnetic imaging. The perceptual loss encourages the preservation of high-level structural features, while the Self-Attention module enables the model to capture long-range dependencies and directional correlations that are critical in representing anisotropic material distributions. This joint architecture is trained to refine coarse permittivity estimates obtained from conventional Back-Propagation Schemes (BPSs). Numerical simulations and validation using measured experimental data demonstrate that the proposed method achieves improved reconstruction accuracy and structural similarity compared with the PGAN without SA and U-Net. In particular, PGAN with SA reduces the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) by 15.1% and improves the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) by 3.8%, confirming its effectiveness in recovering fine-scale details and enhancing reconstruction quality. These results suggest that the proposed framework offers a promising solution for robust and high-resolution electromagnetic imaging in geophysical and remote sensing applications.