Testing the Contrast Source Extended Born method against real data: the TM case

With reference to the case of TM data, in this paper we test the reconstruction capabilities of a recently proposed inverse scattering approach: the contrast source extended Born (CS-EB) inversion method. By relying on a suitable rewriting of the scattering equations, the CS-EB is claimed to be particularly effective whenever losses are present in the background medium and/or in the unknown scatterers. Here, by taking advantage of the Marseille data set concerning lossless inhomogeneous targets in free space, we show the effectiveness of the CS-EB inversion method also in the lossless case. In order to take advantage in a simple fashion of the available multifrequency information, data are processed within a frequency hopping scheme and suitable regularization schemes are exploited at each frequency. Moreover, in order to reduce the computational burden as well as the overall difficulty, the limited bandwidth properties of scattered fields are exploited by means of some simple processing to achieve a preliminary estimation of the region wherein the scatterers are located.