A Variational Expectation-Maximization Method for the Inverse Black Body Radiation Problem

Abstract

The inverse black body radiation problem, which is to reconstruct the area temperature distribution from the measurement of power spectrum distribution, is a well-known ill-posed problem. In this paper, a variational expectation-maximization (EM) method is developed and its convergence is studied. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the variational EM method is more efficient and accurate than the traditional methods, including the Tikhonov regularization method, the Landweber method and the conjugate gradient method.