ON THE LOCAL MINIMA PROBLEM IN CONDUCTIVITY IMAGING VIA A QUADRATIC APPROACH

The nonlinear inverse problem of the reconstruction of the electric co nductivity of a cylindrical object embedded in a homogeneous space is addressed by approximating the operator that maps the conductivity int o the scattered field at the second order. The problem is stated as th e minimization of an error functional that can exhibit local minima. T he geometrical properties of the quadratic operator are exploited to a void the presence of local minima Numerical results validate the theor etical analysis.