Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) image reconstruction has developed for decades and made great achievements, but there is still a need to find a new theoretical framework to make it better and faster. In recent years, machine learning theory has been introduced in the ECT area to solve the image reconstruction problem. However, there is still no public benchmark dataset in the ECT field for the training and testing of machine learning-based image reconstruction algorithms. On the other hand, a public benchmark dataset can provide a standard framework to evaluate and compare the results of different image reconstruction methods. In this paper, a benchmark dataset for ECT image reconstruction is presented. Like the great contribution of ImageNet that transformed machine learning research, this benchmark dataset is hoped to be helpful for society to investigate new image reconstruction algorithms since the relationship between permittivity distribution and capacitance can be better mapped. In addition, different machine learning-based image reconstruction algorithms can be trained and tested by the unified dataset, and the results can be evaluated and compared under the same standard, thus, making the ECT image reconstruction study more open and causing a breakthrough.
Keywords: benchmark dataset; electrical capacitance tomography; image reconstruction; machine learning.