Global inversion of electrical resistivity tomography data for cavity detection

This work aims to apply a well-known global inversion method such as the VSFA (Very Fast Simulated Annealing) for the inversion of ERT data for cavity detection. We focus our study on cavity detection, which is a problem where ERT is known to be diagnostic, due to the high resistive contrast with the background medium. Despite of that, local inversion methods are often inaccurate in the assessment of the actual position, shape and resistivity values of the target, due to the smoothness constraints applied and the loss of resolution with depth. Global inversion provides further insight into the problem with relevant information especially on the uncertainty assessment of the inverted profiles.