A Two-Stage Procedure for Microwave Imaging of a Buried Dielectric along with the Randomly Rough Surface above It

Abstract

A two-stage microwave imaging procedure based on the contrast source inversion (CSI) is proposed for the determination of a buried dielectric along with the rough surface above it. It was previously shown that, the CSI, is very effective for the determination of a dielectric buried under a known rough surface. However, for an unknown surface, the application of the CSI to the entire region containing both the object and the roughness will yield significantly inaccurate dielectric property values and, thus, determination of objects will be almost impossible especially when they are small in size or low in contrast. Thus, we propose to construct a reference model for the background without the object by preimaging the entire region in a frequency-hopping scheme and imposing the a priori known property values to the approximately determined morphology of the background. In the second stage, the CSI is performed at single frequency, assuming the constructed reference model as the background. In this case, by taking the advantage of nonlinear inversion and without a restrictive assumption about the characteristics of the rough surface, the proposed approach yields qualitatively satisfactory results even for multiple objects buried under a surface having a high frequency or large roughness.