Near-field imaging of interior cavities

A novel method is developed for solving the inverse problem of reconstructing the shape of an interior cavity. The boundary of the cavity is assumed to be a small and smooth perturbation of a circle. The incident field is generated by a point source inside the cavity. The scattering data is taken on a circle centered at the source. The method requires only a single incident wave at one frequency. Using a transformed field expansion, the original boundary value problem is reduced to a successive sequence of two-point boundary value problems and is solved in a closed form. By dropping higher order terms in the power series expansion, the inverse problemis linearized and an explicit relation is established between the Fourier coefficients of the cavity surface function and the total field. A nonlinear correction algorithm is devised to improve the accuracy of the reconstruction. Numerical results are presented to show the effectiveness of the method and its ability to obtain subwavelength resolution.