An experimental setup for the microwave imaging of inhomogeneous dielectric bodies

A free-space method for the microwave imaging of inhomogeneous dielectric bodies is presented. The proposed technique forms the basis for the active imaging of dielectric bodies in the field of biomedical microwave tomography, and for the detection of anti-personnel plastic mines in the field of remote sensing. The method is based on measuring the complex reflection coefficient data of dielectric objects in free-space, and reconstructing the permittivity profiles of these objects from the measured reflection coefficient data using a recently proposed algorithm. A good agreement between the actual and the reconstructed dielectric images for a number of cases shows the validity of the proposed scheme.