Three-dimensional reconstruction of dielectric objects by the coupled-dipole method

We present an inversion procedure for electromagnetic scattering, based on the powerful and flexible technique called the coupled-dipole method combined with an optimization algorithm. This method permits us to realize imaging of dielectric objects whose dimensions are comparable with the incident wavelength and is shown to be efficient with corrupted data (scattered electric field). The feasibility of this method is shown in a synthetic example in which the scattered field is corrupted with Gaussian noise. Two methods are used to invert the scattered field to recover the refractive index of the medium: a conventional matrix inversion and an iterative method. © 2000 Optical Society of America.