Undersea Buried Pipeline Reconstruction Based on the Level Set and Inverse Multiquadric Regularization Method

The electric inversion technique reconstructs the subsurface medium distribution from acquired data. On the basis of electric inversion, objects buried under the earth or seabed, such as pipelines and unexploded ordnance, are detected and located in a contactless manner. However, the process of accurately reconstructing the shape of the target object is challenging because electric inversion is a nonlinear and ill-posed problem. In this work, we present an inverse multiquadric (IMQ) regularization method based on the level set function for reconstructing buried pipelines. In the case of locating underwater objects, the unknown inversion area is split into two parts, the background and the pipeline with known conductivity. The geometry of the pipeline is represented based on the level set function for achieving a noiseless inversion image. To obtain a binary image, the IMQ is used as the regularization term, which ‘pushes’ the level set function away from 0. We also provide an appropriate method to select the bandwidth and regularization parameters for the IMQ regularization term, resulting in reconstructed images with sharp edges. The simulation results and analysis show that the proposed method performs better than classical inversion methods.