Tomographic Inversion Technique Using Orthogonal Basis Patterns

Tomographic reconstruction of the emission profile is a typical ill-posed inversion problem. It becomes troublesome in fusion plasma diagnostics because the possible location/direction of the observation is quite limited. In order to overcome the difficulty, many techniques have been developed. Among them, series expansion methods are based on decomposing the emission profile with orthogonal or nearly orthogonal basis patterns. Since it is possible to ignore the surplus components with higher spatial frequency, this type of method is robust against noise issues. Two topics are discussed in this article. The first issue is the comparison of the basis systems themselves. Conventional one of Fourier-Bessel and a new one of the so-called Laplacian eigen function are compared from the viewpoint of the capability of expressing the patterns that appear in the fusion plasma experiment. The second issue is the application to the tangential viewing imaging system. It is shown that, even from the limited information, tomographic reconstruction can be adequately performed with appropriate use of the regularization, especially with the use of the L1 regularization. (C) 2019 The Japan Society of Plasma Science and Nuclear Fusion Research