Application of Maximum Entropy to Radio Imaging of Geological Features

Radio waves may be used to image the electrical properties of rock for geological exploration and mining. The tomographic reconstruction of an attenuation image from radio wave survey data may be formulated as an ill-posed linear inverse problem. The inversion is ill-posed since the data are incomplete and noisy and an inexact simplified linear model of radio wave propagation through rock is assumed. Such inverse problems will have many ‘solutions’ which fit the observed data. Since the pixel attenuation values are a positive additive distribution, the reconstructed image with maximum entropy relative to all prior information is a solution with the least amount of structure not indicated by the data.