Computationally efficient image reconstruction algorithm for electrical capacitance tomography

The electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a visualization measurement method and can reconstruct the spatial permittivity distribution information in a measurement domain based on given capacitance values, in which the effectiveness of the image reconstruction algorithm plays a vital role in real-world engineering applications. Unlike common imaging methods, within the framework of the Tikhonov regularization methodology and the transform-domain sparsity method, a new cost function encapsulating the wavelet-based sparsity constraint is proposed to model the ECT imaging problem. An iteration scheme that integrates the superiorities of the alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm and splits a complicated optimization problem into several simpler sub-problems is developed to seek for the optimal solution of the proposed cost function. Numerical experiments validate that the proposed imaging algorithm is practicable and effective, and can improve the reconstruction accuracy and robustness.