A novel microwave imaging approach to reconstruct the dielectric properties of targets hosted in partially known, noncanonical, scenarios is proposed and assessed. The method takes joint advantage of the recently introduced virtual experiments paradigm and exploits a new linear approximation developed within such a framework. Such an approximation implicitly depends on the unknown targets and, therefore, has a broader applicability as compared with the traditional distorted Born approximation. Being noniterative, the resulting distorted-wave inversion method is capable of quasi-real-time imaging and successfully images nonweak perturbations. The performances of the novel imaging method have been assessed with simulated data and validated experimentally against some of Fresnel data sets.
