Inverse obstacle scattering for elastic waves in three dimensions (Q2003054)

In this paper, the authors consider the scattering of an elastic plane wave by a three-dimensional rigid obstacle, which is embedded in free space filled with a homogeneous and isotropic elastic medium. Such problems are motivated by significant applications in nondestructive testing, geophysics and seismology. The scattering problem is reformulated into a boundary-value problem by introducing a transparent boundary condition on a sphere enclosing the obstacle. The direct problem is to determine the displacement of the total wave field from the known obstacle. The inverse problem amounts to determining the obstacle's surface from the measurement of the displacement on an artificial boundary enclosing the obstacle. The goal of the paper is fourfold: (1) develop an exact transparent boundary condition to reduce the scattering problem into a boundary-value problem; (2) establish the well-posedness of the solution for the direct problem by studying its variational formulation; (3) characterize the domain derivative of the wave field with respect to the variation of the obstacle's surface; (4) propose a frequency-continuation method to reconstruct the obstacle's surface. The authors note that this paper extends the related two-dimensional work [\textit{P. Li} et al., Inverse Probl. 32, No. 11, Article ID 115018, 24 p. (2016; Zbl 1433.74064)] by considering the more complicated Maxwell's-type equation and associated spherical harmonics when studying the transparent boundary condition. The proofs are based on asymptotic analysis of the boundary operators, the Helmholtz decomposition, and the Fredholm alternative theorem. Also, the present work is more computationally intensive. The developed frequency-domain method for solving the inverse problem requires multi-frequency data. At each frequency, the descent method is applied with the starting point given by the output from the previous step. In this way, an approximation to the surface is created, which is filtered at a higher frequency. A frequency-continuation algorithm for the surface reconstruction is presented. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by two numerical examples. The scattering data is obtained from solving the direct problem by using the Finite Element Method with the Perfectly Matched Layer technique, which is implemented via FreeFem++. To test the stability, noise is also added to the data. The results show that the method is indeed stable and accurate to reconstruct surfaces in the presence of noise.