Tomographic imaging: potential and limitations

The behavior of engineering systems is highly dependent on the distribution of material parameters. The goal of tomographic imaging is to invert boundary measurements to determine the field of a parameter. This paper reviews difficulties in tomographic imaging, summarizes inversion methods and ray tracing algorithms, and presents a comparative study of matrix-based inversion methods for simulated, laboratory, and field data. The effect of errors in ray-paths and travel times is assessed.