Date of Award

Fall 2011

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Supervisor

Natalia K. Nikolova

Co-Supervisor

Mohamed H. Bakr, John W. Bandler

Language

English

Committee Member

Mohamed H. Bakr, John W. Bandler

Abstract

In this thesis, inverse problems related to microwave imaging and microwave component design are investigated. Our contribution in microwave imaging for breast tumor detection can be divided into two parts. In the first part, a vectorial 3D near-field microwave holography is proposed which is an improvement over the existing holography algorithms. In the second part, a simple and fast post-processing algorithm based on the principle of blind de-convolution is proposed for removing the integration effect of the antenna aperture. This allows for the data collected by the antennas to be used in 3D holography reconstruction. The blind deconvolution algorithm is a well-known algorithm in signal processing and our contribution here is its adaptation to microwave data processing.

Second, a procedure for accelerating the space-mapping optimization process is presented. By exploiting both fine- and surrogate-model sensitivity information, a good mapping between the two model spaces is efficiently obtained. This results in a significant speed-up over direct gradient-based optimization of the original fine model and enhanced performance compared with other space-mapping approaches. Our approach utilizes commercially available software with adjoint-sensitivity analysis capabilities.

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