Electromagnetic Imaging of Dielectric Objects Using a Multi-Directional Search-Based Simulated Annealing.

In this paper, we introduce a global optimization method that is a novel combination of the simulated annealing method and the multi-directional search algorithm. We demonstrate the use of the algorithm for a microwave-imaging system to obtain the electrical properties of objects. The proposed global optimizer significantly improves the performance and speed of the simulated annealing method by utilizing a nonlinear simplex search, starting from an initial guess, and taking effective steps in obtaining the global solution of the minimization problem.