Novel Approach for Tomographic Reconstruction of Gas Concentration Distributions in Air: Use of Smooth Basis Functions and Simulated Annealing

Optical remote sensing and iterative computed tomography (CT) can be applied to measure the spatial distribution of gaseous pollutant concentrations. We conducted chamber experiments to test this combination of techniques using an open path Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (OP-FTIR) and a standard algebraic reconstruction technique (ART). Although ART converged to solutions that showed excellent agreement with the measured ray-integral concentrations, the solutions were inconsistent with simultaneously gathered point-sample concentration measurements. A new CT method was developed that combines (1) the superposition of bivariate Gaussians to represent the concentration distribution and (2) a simulated annealing minimization routine to find the parameters of the Gaussian basis functions that result in the best fit to the ray-integral concentration data. This method, named smooth basis function minimization (SBFM), generated reconstructions that agreed well, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the concentration profiles generated from point sampling. We present an analysis of two sets of experimental data that compares the performance of ART and SBFM. We conclude that SBFM is a superior CT reconstruction method for practical indoor and outdoor air monitoring applications.