Microwave imaging of buried inhomogeneous objects using parallel genetic algorithm combined with FDTD method

Microwave imaging of buried objects has been widely used in sensing and remote-sensing applications. It can be formulated and solved as inverse scattering problems. In this paper, we propose a hybrid numerical technique based on the parallel genetic algorithm (GA) and the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method for determining the location and dimensions of two-dimensional inhomogeneous objects buried in a lossy earth. The GA, a robust stochastic optimization procedure, is employed to recast the inverse scattering problem to a global optimization problem for its solution. To reduce its heavy computation burden, the GA-based inverse computation is parallelized and run on a multiprocessor cluster system. The FDTD method is selected for the forward calculation of the scattered field by the buried inhomogeneous object because it can effectively model an inhomogeneous object of arbitrary shape. Sample numerical results are presented and analyzed. The analysis of the numerical results shows that the proposed hybrid numerical technique is able to determine the location and dimension of a 2D buried inhomogeneous object, and the parallel computation can effectively reduce the required computation time.