Isotropic and anisotropic total variation regularization in electrical impedance tomography

This paper focuses on studying the effects of isotropic and anisotropic total variation (TV) regularization in electrical impedance tomography (EIT). A characteristic difference between these two widely used TV regularization methods is that the isotropic TV is rotationally invariant and the anisotropic TV is not. The rotational variance of the anisotropic TV is known to cause geometric distortions by favoring edge orientations that are aligned with co-ordinate axes. In many applications, such as transmission tomography problems, these distortions often play only a minor role in the overall accuracy of reconstructed images, because the measurement data is sensitive to the shapes of the edges in the imaged domain. In EIT and other diffusive image modalities, however, the data is severely less sensitive to the fine details of edges, and it is an open question how large impact the selection of the TV regularization variant has on the reconstructed images. In this work, this effect is investigated based on a set of experiments. The results demonstrate that the choice between isotropic and anisotropic TV regularization indeed has a significant impact on the properties of EIT reconstructions; especially, the tendency of the anisotropic TV to favor edges aligned with co-ordinate axes is shown to yield large geometric distortions in EIT reconstructions.