Enhancing the factorization method relying on its physical meaning

The Factorization Method is an inversion method capable to image the shape of a target by means of a suitable processing of the field it scatters. In this communication, we provide some insight in the physics behind the method and exploit it to improve the method's performance. In particular, we consider a generalization of the FM formulation that allows to improve the imaging results in terms of shape reconstruction and introduce a novel strategy that exploits the generalized FM not only to recover the shape, but also to estimate the electric features (permittivity and conductivity) of the unknown target. This enhanced FM represents a new tool to tackle inverse scattering problems in an effective and reliable way.