An adaptive finite element method for Fredholm integral equations of the first kind and its verification on experimental data (Q360329)

The authors discuss the numerical solution of a Fredholm integral equation of the first kind with a smooth kernel. A finite element method is applied to the Tikhonov regularization of this ill-posed problem. In order to obtain an optimal discretization the authors investigate a simple a posteriori error estimator and use it in the numerical experiments to drive an adaptive finite element method. The numerical results show that the adaptive scheme produces better results in some cases than the uniform approach. A comparison with a method based on bounded total variation is also included.