%L elediasc12405 %T Effective Exploitation of the a-priori Information through a Microwave Imaging Procedure Based on the Smw for Nde/Ndt Applications %I University of Trento %A Manuel Benedetti %A Massimo Donelli %A Gabriele Franceschini %A Matteo Pastorino %A Andrea Massa %X This paper presents an innovative microwave technique, which is suitable for the detection of defects in non-destructive-evaluation (NDT/NDE) applications where a lot of a-priori information is available. The proposed approach is based on the equations of the inverse scattering problem, which are solved by means of a minimization procedure based on a Genetic Algorithm (GA). To reduce the number of problem unknowns, the available a-priori information is efficiently exploited by introducing an updating procedure for the electric field computation based on the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury (SWM) formula. The results of a representative set of numerical experiments as well as comparisons with state-of-the-art methods are reported. They confirm the effectiveness, the feasibility and the robustness of the proposed approach, which some interesting features by a computational point-of-view, as well. %D 2005