Research on the total variation regularization algorithm for electrical capacitance tomography

To solve the ill-posed problem in electrical capacitance tomography (ECT), a total variation (TV) regularization algorithm is proposed, in which a variation function of common boundary between different media is constructed, and introduced as a regularization penalty term in ECT image reconstruction. Simulation results show that the proposed TV regularization algorithm (based on ℓ1 regularization) makes the inverse problem well-posed; more important, compared with conventional ℓ2 Tikhonov regularization, it improves the quality of the reconstruction image for discontinuous media distribution areas, and leads to the common boundary between different media clearer.