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International Society for Industrial Process Tomography

1st World Congress on Industrial Process Tomography

Information Retrieval by Electrical Capacitance Tomography: Evaluation of an Iterative Algorithm and the Importance

of Boundary Conditions


H McCann*, W Q Yang* and N P Polydorides


Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, UMIST, P O Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD, UK, email McCann@fs5.ee.umist.ac.uk


* HMcC and WQY are members of the Virtual Centre for Industrial Process Tomography

Now with the University of Oxford


Abstract - Empirical performance of a newly developed iterative image reconstruction algorithm for electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) has been assessed by the use of various phantoms. It is based on the retrieval of information relating to the gross features of each phantom, rather than Dr of each individual pixel. Some practical limitations of the present algorithm have been identified. It has been found experimentally that the number of independent information elements retrieved approaches the number of independent capacitance measurements. Analysis of electrostatic boundary conditions for ECT is also presented, indicating a large number of physical constraints for image reconstruction, in addition to the capacitance measurements. It is suggested that the iterative algorithm carries out implicit regularisation with those constraints, and that the information content of ECT images could be much larger than previously suggested. An alternative measurement protocol is proposed to enhance further the information content.


Keywords: Capacitance tomography, Iterative image reconstruction, Experiment evaluation


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