Electromagnetic wave imaging of targets buried in a cluttered medium using a hybrid inversion-DORT method

The detection and the characterization of targets buried in a natural medium using an array of monochromatic micro-wave antennas are difficult tasks as medium heterogeneities blur the signature of the objects of interest. In this paper, we propose to couple a nonlinear inversion method to an eigenvector analysis of the time reversal operator (Decomposition de l'Operateur de Retournement temporel (DORT) technique) for imaging the targets. We show that this combined approach yields much better results than those of the inversion or DORT approaches alone. In particular, it enables us to characterize targets in highly cluttered environments supporting multiple scattering. The efficiency of the technique is illustrated throughout many examples with varying clutter statistics.