Thorsten Hohage

D. Fournier, L. Gizon, M. Holzke et al.

A major goal of helioseismology is the three-dimensional reconstruction of the three velocity components of convective flows in the solar interior from sets of wave travel-time measurements. For small amplitude flows, the forward problem is described in good approximation by a large system of convolution equations. The input observations are highly noisy random vectors with a known dense covariance matrix. This leads to a large statistical linear inverse problem. Whereas for deterministic linear inverse problems several computationally efficient minimax optimal regularization methods exist, only one minimax-optimal linear estimator exists for statistical linear inverse problems: the Pinsker estimator. However, it is often computationally inefficient because it requires a singular value decomposition of the forward operator or it is not applicable because of an unknown noise covariance matrix, so it is rarely used for real-world problems. These limitations do not apply in helioseismology. We present a simplified proof of the optimality properties of the Pinsker estimator and show that it yields significantly better reconstructions than traditional inversion methods used in helioseismology, i.e.\ Regularized Least Squares (Tikhonov regularization) and SOLA (approximate inverse) methods. Moreover, we discuss the incorporation of the mass conservation constraint in the Pinsker scheme using staggered grids. With this improvement we can reconstruct not only horizontal, but also vertical velocity components that are much smaller in amplitude.

Thorsten Hohage, Milad Karimi, Björn Müller

Holographic coherent X-ray imaging enables nanoscale imaging of biological cells and tissues, rendering both phase and absorption contrast, i.e. real and imaginary parts of the refractive index. Unlike the standard model, which assumes a perfectly coherent incident beam, we consider partial coherence characterized by a known covariance operator. In addition, we assume time-resolved intensity measurements, granting access not only to expected intensities but also to their correlations. We investigate the information content of these correlations and analytically demonstrate that, under a symmetry-breaking condition on the sample and the illumination area, both phase and absorption contrast can be uniquely recovered in both the full and the linearized models. A key challenge in numerical reconstruction is the substantial increase in data dimensionality caused by computing intensity correlations during preprocessing. We propose a novel approach that leverages a low-rank assumption on the incident beam covariance operator, bypassing explicit correlation computation while still exploiting its full information. Numerical experiments demonstrate its feasibility, yielding accurate simultaneous reconstructions of phase and absorption contrast.

Alexey Agaltsov, Thorsten Hohage, Roman Novikov

This paper is concerned with the inverse problem to recover a compactly supported Schr{ö}dinger potential given the differential scattering cross section, i.e. the modulus, but not the phase of the scattering amplitude. To compensate for the missing phase information we assume additional measurements of the differential cross section in the presence of known background objects. We propose an iterative scheme for the numerical solution of this problem and prove that it converges globally of arbitrarily high order depending on the smoothness of the unknown potential as the energy tends to infinity. At fixed energy, however, the proposed iteration does not converge to the true solution even for exact data. Nevertheless, numerical experiments show that it yields remarkably accurate approximations with small computational effort even for moderate energies. At small noise levels it may be worth to improve these approximations by a few steps of a locally convergent iterative regularization method, and we demonstrate to which extent this reduces the reconstruction error.

Hans-Georg Raumer, Carsten Spehr, Thorsten Hohage et al.

This article discusses aeroacoustic imaging methods based on correlation measurements in the frequency domain. Standard methods in this field assume that the estimated correlation matrix is superimposed with additive white noise. In this paper we present a mathematical model for the measurement process covering arbitrarily correlated noise. The covariance matrix of correlation data is given in terms of fourth order moments. The aim of this paper is to explore the use of such additional information on the measurement data in imaging methods. For this purpose a class of weighted data spaces is introduced, where each data space naturally defines an associated beamforming method with a corresponding point spread function. This generic class of beamformers contains many well-known methods such as Conventional Beamforming, (Robust) Adaptive Beamforming or beamforming with shading. This article examines in particular weightings that depend on the noise (co)variances. In a theoretical analysis we prove that the beamformer, weighted by the full noise covariance matrix, has minimal variance among all beamformers from the described class. Application of the (co)variance weighted methods on synthetic and experimental data show that the resolution of the results is improved and noise effects are reduced.

Frederic Weidling, Benjamin Sprung, Thorsten Hohage

This paper deals with Tikhonov regularization for linear and nonlinear ill-posed operator equations with wavelet Besov norm penalties. We show order optimal rates of convergence for finitely smoothing operators and for the backwards heat equation for a range of Besov spaces using variational source conditions. We also derive order optimal rates for a white noise model with the help of variational source conditions and concentration inequalities for sharp negative Besov norms of the noise.