A hybrid method for inverse scattering for sound-soft obstacles in \(\mathbb R^3\) (Q2470783)

The paper deals with the inverse acoustic sound-soft obstacle inverse scattering problem in \(\mathbb R^3\). Given an open bonded obstacle \(D \in\mathbb R^3\) with a connected (unbounded) complement and given an incident field \(u^i\), the direct problem consists of finding the total field \(u=u^i + u^s\) as the sum of the known incident field \(u^i\) and the scattered field \(u^s\) such that both the Helmholtz equation \(\Delta u + k^2 u = 0 \) in \(\mathbb R^3 \setminus \overline{D}\) with the wave number \(k>0\) and the Dirichlet boundary condition \(u=0\) on \(\Gamma = \partial D\) are satisfied. At infinity one needs to impose the Sommerfeld radiation condition. Then it is known that the solution \(u^s\) has an asymptotic behavior of the form \[ u^s(x) = \frac{e^{ik | x| }}{| x| } \left (u_{\infty}(\widehat{x}) + O \left (\frac{1}{| x| } \right) \right ), \;| x| \to \infty, \] where \(\widehat{x} =\frac{x}{| x| }\), the far-field pattern \(u_{\infty}\) is defined on the unit sphere. The inverse problem is the following: given an incident field \(u^i\) and the corresponding far-field pattern \(u_{\infty}\), determine the position and the shape of the obstacle \(D\). This problem is nonlinear and ill-posed. A hybrid method for the numerical solution of the inverse obstacle scattering problem is suggested. The method combines ideas of both iterative and decomposition methods, inheriting advantages of each of them, such as getting good reconstructions and not needing a forward solver at each step. In spirit of a decomposition method it treats the nonlineariy and ill-posedness in two separate steps. In first ill-posed step, the scattered field is reconstructed as a layer potential over the current approximation to the boundary [see \textit{A. Kirsch} and \textit{R. Kress}, An approximation method in inverse acoustic scattering. Boundary elements IX, Vol. 3, Springer, 3--18 (1987)]. Then in nonlinear second step, an update is achieved by solving a linearized equation in a Newton method's spirit. Then two steps are iterated until some stopping criterion is fulfilled. A related Newton method is considered. In current literature the convergence analysis is done for the usual Newton method applied to the operator that maps the boundary to the far-field pattern of the corresponding scattered wave. In the present work the authors are interested in a different operator that is related to the hybrid method. The hybrid method is defined as a point-wise iterative scheme. Its convergence is established under some assumptions. The numerical results are presented.