A non-convex regularization method combined with Landweber method for image reconstruction in electrical resistance tomography

Abstract Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) is a promising technique with which the conductivity distribution in the detected region can be visualized. Mathematically, the reconstruction of conductivity distribution is a seriously ill-posed inverse problem which poses a great challenge for the ERT sensing technique. The regularization method has been found to be an effective approach in coping with the inverse problem. In this work, a novel reconstruction strategy which combines the non-convex regularization method with Landweber method is proposed for the image reconstruction in ERT. At each iteration, the non-convex regularization is used to constrain the conductivity calculated with the Landweber method. A simple and efficient generalized iterated shrinkage algorithm is developed to solve the proposed method. To validate the performance of the proposed method, a series of numerical simulation is conducted and comparative analysis with other methods is performed. From the results, it can be observed that images with high quality are obtained when reconstructing with the proposed method. The impact of noise on the reconstruction is also investigated which shows that the images reconstructed by the proposed method are the least sensitive to the noise. The performance of the proposed method in the image reconstruction is also verified by experimental data. The results demonstrate that the inclusion is accurately reconstructed and the background is clear when the proposed method is adopted for the image reconstruction.