A Robust Inclusion Boundary Reconstructor for Electrical Impedance Tomography With Geometric Constraints

As a nondestructive, nonradioactive, and high temporal resolution technique, electrical impedance tomography (EIT) has potential applications in industrial and biomedical imaging. A novel geometrically constrained boundary reconstructor (GCBR) is presented for EIT. It can directly calculate the boundary of the target inclusions embedded into a homogeneous background conductivity and is robust to noise. The proposed GCBR depends on a specially designed energy function, which consists of the residual term and the geometric constraints’ term. The residual term drives the estimated inclusion boundary to the targets. The geometric constraints’ term regularizes the estimations and automatically excludes the meaningless boundary guesses from the candidate solution. A set of numerical tests are conducted to discuss the key factors influencing the boundary reconstruction performance. A set of experimental tests are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed GCBR. The position, size, and shape of the target inclusions are well reconstructed from the real data. The mean position error and mean Hausdorff distances between the target and reconstructed boundaries are 0.39% and 2.2% of the maximal observation diameter, respectively. The mean area errors and the mean area of the symmetric difference between the target and reconstructed inclusion regions are 0.32% and 2.54% of the total observation area, respectively.