Solving Electromagnetic Inverse Scattering Problems in Inhomogeneous Media by Deep Convolutional Encoder–Decoder Structure

This communication proposes a novel deep learning (DL) approach to solve electromagnetic inverse scattering (EMIS) problems in inhomogeneous media. The conventional approaches for solving inhomogeneous EMIS problems generally have to consider inhomogeneous Green’s functions or conduct approximation operations to media, which inevitably introduces various challenges, including complex mathematical derivation, high computation cost, unavoidable nonlinearity, and even strong ill-posedness. To avoid these challenges, we propose a DL approach based on the complex-valued deep convolutional neural networks (DConvNets), which comprise the deep convolutional encoder–decoder (DCED) structure. Its training data are collected based on the simple synthetic dataset. While the scattered fields received in the measurement domain are utilized as the input for the encoder to extract feature fragments, the final output for the counterpart decoder is the contrasts (permittivities) of dielectric scatterers in the target domain. In this way, unlike the conventional methods, the unknown domain between the target domain and measurement domain never has to be considered to compute inhomogeneous Green’s functions. Consequently, the inhomogeneous EMIS problems could be solved with higher accuracy even for extremely high-contrast targets. Numerical examples illustrate the feasibility of the proposed DL approach. It acts as a new candidate for solving EMIS problems in inhomogeneous media.