Evaluating Cross-Plane Acquisitions for Volume Process Tomography in the Laplacian Regime

Process tomography is a well established imaging modality to monitor a variety of flow processes in industrial applications. Traditionally, this has been done through imaging of a cross section of the domain. In recent years, much interest has been devoted to volume process tomography, where a three-dimensional reconstruction is directly obtained. However, depending on the sensor design, the number of independent measurements can be much higher in volume tomography compared to its two-dimensional counterpart. This makes the reconstruction problem more challenging and may prevent real-time monitoring in certain cases. In this work we investigate the optimal choice of cross-layer measurements to provide accurate volumetric tomography while minimizing image reconstruction costs using electrical capacitance volume tomography as example.