Special Session 19: New trends in inverse problems for partial differential equations

Localization of Point Scatterers via Sparse Optimization on Measures
Giovanni S. Alberti
University of Genoa
Italy
Co-Author(s):    Romain Petit, Matteo Santacesaria
Abstract:
We consider the inverse scattering problem for time-harmonic acoustic waves in a medium with pointwise inhomogeneities. In the Foldy--Lax model, the estimation of the scatterers` locations and intensities from far field measurements can be recast as the recovery of a discrete measure from nonlinear observations. We propose a ``linearize and locally optimize`` approach to perform this reconstruction. We first solve a convex program in the space of measures (known as the Beurling LASSO), which involves a linearization of the forward operator (the far field pattern in the Born approximation). Then, we locally minimize a second functional involving the nonlinear forward map, using the output of the first step as initialization. We provide guarantees that the output of the first step is close to the sought-after measure when the scatterers have small intensities and are sufficiently separated. We also provide numerical evidence that the second step still allows for accurate recovery in settings that are more involved.