Abstract—A heterogeneous scattering medium has different material properties in different areas. For such a medium, we present an algorithm to reconstruct the interior materials from measurements of light at the boundary of the medium. The algorithm uses a novel hierarchical stochastic search over the space of materials to find an arrangement of inner materials that best matches the boundary conditions. The algorithm performs a combination of depth- and breadthfirst search, choosing random permutations of materials at each step. Validation is performed with a variety of difficult material combinations. We have shown the proposed algorithm is capable of reconstructing a variety of heterogeneous media over the full domain of Henyey- Greenstein materials if the materials are known a priori. We have also demonstrated the algorithm’s capability to reconstruct the same materials without knowing the materials a priori.

Index Terms—inverse scattering, rendering, reconstruction, imaging, physics

Cite: Benjamin T. Cecchetto and James Stewart, "Reconstruction of Heterogeneous Scattering Media Using Stochastic Search," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 114-121, December 2021. doi: 10.18178/joig.9.4.114-121

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