Noise Analysis of Miniature Planar Three-Dimensional Electrical Capacitance Tomography Sensors

The planar electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) sensor has gained popularity for its ability to reconstruct two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) images in applications such as defect and landmines detection. Besides, miniature planar ECT has been investigated for biomedical imaging and lab-on-chip monitoring in terms of the design of electrode to improve the quality of reconstructed image. However, the study on the noise performance of the sensor is limited. Therefore, this paper compared the noise performance of peripheral, single plane distributed and dual plane distributed sensors in 3D image reconstruction using simulation approach. A detailed simulation procedure involving the modelling of sensors, generation of sensitivity map and simulating the capacitance measurement are described in this paper. The simulated capacitance data of the sensors were added with White Gaussian noise to produce noisy capacitance data that was used for 3D image reconstruction. Then, quality of the reconstructed 3D image at different noise level were compared quantitatively using the correlation coefficient. The simulation results revealed that the increase in the number of electrode pair combinations and the distributed electrode arrangement enables the miniature planar ECT sensor to reconstruct 3D image at low SNR of 20 dB.