Recovering a polyhedral obstacle by a few backscattering measurements (Q2347026)

The authors present an inverse acoustic scattering scheme to recover sound-soft or sound-hard polyhedral obstacles from only a few far-field measurements. The analysis makes use of the high-frequency physical optics approximation and only convex polyhedral obstacles are considered. However, the numerical experiments presented show that the high-frequency requirement can be relaxed to a certain extent and the theoretical arguments used by the authors indicate that the presented method may work for non-convex obstacles as well (under certain geometrical constraints). The authors show that the modulus of the far-field pattern in the backscattering aperture possesses a certain local maximum behavior from which one can determine the exterior normal directions of the front sides or faces of the object. The idea is then to first use the magnitude of the backscattering data that corresponds to just a few suitably chosen incident plane waves to determine the exterior unit normals on each of the sides or faces of the object. After these normals are determined, the phase of the scattered field data is used to recover the object by solving a finite-dimensional problem which consists of determining the distance from each face or side to a location point of the object. Numerical results are presented that illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.