Singular values of the attenuated photoacoustic imaging operator (Q1785923)

Since Grace Wahba introduced in 1980 the \textit{degree of ill-posedness} of an inverse problem with a compact linear forward operator \(\mathcal{A}\) mapping between Hilbert spaces by the \textit{decay rate} to zero of its ordered singular values \(s_n(\mathcal{A})\), it is always a grateful task to verify such degree for applied inverse problems of high practical relevance. These tasks are mostly challenging, but it is really important to know if the inverse problem is mildly/moderately ill-posed in the sense that \(s_n(\mathcal{A})\) is proportional to \(n^{-\alpha}\) with some exponent \(0<\alpha<\infty\) or if it is severely/exponentially ill-posed, for example as \(s_n(\mathcal{A}) \sim \exp(-n^\gamma)\) with some \(\gamma>0\). In the latter case, which is associated with very smooth kernel functions if \(\mathcal{A}\) is a linear Fredholm integral operator, the chances to recover solutions of the inverse problem from noisy data are greatly reduced. This is because the forward operator is much more `smoothing', which leads in a greater extent to the extinction of information about the solution in the observation data. As a consequence, adapted regularization approaches are required for exponentially ill-posed problems in order to obtain at least principal components of the desired solutions. The goal of this comprehensive paper is to verify the degree of ill-posedness for the \textit{attenuated photoacoustic operator} \(\mathcal{A}_\kappa\), where the smooth function \(\kappa: \mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{C}\) is the \textit{attenuation coefficient}. They distinguish between \textit{strong} attenuation coefficients with \( \mathfrak{I}m\, \kappa(\omega) \geq \kappa_0 |\omega|^\beta\) for all \(\omega \in \mathbb{R}\), \(\beta>0\), \(|\omega| \geq \omega_0\), and \textit{weak} attenuation coefficients of the form \(\kappa(\omega)=\frac{\omega}{c}+i\, \kappa_\infty+k_*(\omega)\) for some constants \(c>0\) and \(\kappa_\infty\geq 0\) as well as a bounded function \(k_* \in C^\infty(\mathbb(R) \cap L^2(\mathbb(R))\). In Section 3, the authors present in detail five example situations for attenuation models of both types. Throughout the paper, it is shown that this distinction makes sense with respect to the degree of ill-posedness. Precisely, operators \(\mathcal{A}_\kappa\) with strong attenuation coefficients \(\kappa\) correspond to integral operators with very smooth kernels, and an exponential decay of the singular values \(s_n(\mathcal{A}_\kappa)\) to zero is the consequence. On the other hand, it is shown that forward operators \(\mathcal{A}_\kappa\) with weak attenuation coefficients \(\kappa\) behave like in the non-attenuating case where \(\kappa(\omega)=\frac{\omega}{c}\). In this context, the authors refer to investigations by \textit{V.~P.~Palamodov} in the paper [Inverse Probl.~Imaging 4, No.~4, 693--702 (2010; Zbl 1213.53094)], which indicate that the compact linear forward operator \(\mathcal{A}_\kappa\) of the inverse problem of photoacoustic imaging in the three-dimensional space for the case of \textit{non-attenuating media} has a decay rate \(s_n(\mathcal{A}_\kappa) \sim n^{-1/3}\) of the singular values. Overall, with the results for both cases Elbau, Scherzer and Shi bridge a gap in the theory with respect to missing assertions about the singular value behaviour of the attenuated photoacoustic imaging operator. The paper is organized as follows: A short introduction compares the wave equation problem of standard photoacoustic imaging and the counterpart for attenuating media, where pseudo-differential operators occur and all considerations are done in the frequency space. In Section 2, the attenuated wave equation problem and its solution are investigated from an analytic point of view. In particular, the attenuated wave equation with finite speed is discussed. The subsequent Section 3 presents examples of attenuation models. In Section 4, the integrated photoacoustic operator is under consideration, for which the singular value asymptotics is verified in Section 5. Two appendices on eigenvalues of Hilbert-Schmidt integral operators and assertions on estimating the kernel of the integrated photoacoustic operator as well as a reference list with 22 entries complete the article.