Three-dimensional electromagnetic nonlinear inversion in layered media by a hybrid diagonal tensor approximation: Stabilized biconjugate gradient fast Fourier transform method

This paper presents an efficient three-dimensional nonlinear electromagnetic inversion method in a multilayered medium for radar applications where the object size is comparable to the wavelength. In the first step of this two-step inversion algorithm, the diagonal tensor approximation is used in the Born iterative method. The solution of this approximate inversion is used as an initial guess for the second step in which further inversion is carried out using a distorted Born iterative method. Since the aim of the second step is to improve the accuracy of the inversion, a full-wave solver, the stabilized biconjugate-gradient fast Fourier transform algorithm, is used for forward modelling. The conjugate-gradient method is applied at each inversion iteration to minimize the functional cost. The usage of an iterative solver based on the FFT algorithm and the developed recursive matrix method combined with an interpolation technique to evaluate the layered medium Green's functions rapidly, makes this method highly efficient. An inversion problem with 32 768 complex unknowns can be solved with 1% relative error by using a simple personal computer. Several numerical experiments for arbitrarily located source and receiver arrays are presented to show the high efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.