Resolution Enhancement for Mixed Boundary Conditions in Inverse Scattering Problems

In the mixed boundary inverse scattering problem (ISP), conducting and dielectric scatterers coexist in the same region, which challenges the present quantitative inverse scattering methods. Moreover, to ensure the incident waves penetrating the lossy or high-contrast objects, lower wavelength is applied in most inverse scattering applications. Therefore, methods with wavelength or subwavelength resolution are required for the mixed boundary ISP. In this article, we devise a quantitative inversion scheme alternately updating the contrast of dielectric scatterers and the T-matrix of conducting scatterers. The proposed alternate parameter updating method (APUM) avoids the reconstruction deterioration from both the large imaginary parts of conducting contrasts and the limited expansion order of the T-matrix. Then, we further improve the resolution of the APUM by optimizing the incident fields, which is also a regularization strategy. In particular, we design superoscillatory incident fields to quantitatively converse the high spatial spectrum of objects into low spectrum contrast sources, which can retain the high-frequency information of objects in the low-passband of the Green function. The results with synthetic data and single-frequency Fresnel experimental data verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.