Numerical methods for multiscale inverse problems
This work provides a framework for solving multiscale inverse problems that avoids ill-posedness, benefiting researchers in geophysics and medical imaging.
The paper addresses the inverse problem of recovering highly oscillatory coefficients in multiscale PDEs by using a low-dimensional parametrization of the microscale, coupled with analytic homogenization or multiscale numerical methods. They prove uniqueness for certain cases and demonstrate numerical examples in medical imaging and seismology.
We consider the inverse problem of determining the highly oscillatory coefficient $a^ε$ in partial differential equations of the form $-\nabla\cdot (a^ε\nabla u^ε)+bu^ε= f$ from given measurements of the solutions. Here, $ε$ indicates the smallest characteristic wavelength in the problem ($0<ε\ll1$). In addition to the general difficulty of finding an inverse, the oscillatory nature of the forward problem creates an additional challenge of multiscale modeling, which is hard even for forward computations. The inverse problem in its full generality is typically ill-posed and one common approach is to replace the original problem with an effective parameter estimation problem. We will here include microscale features directly in the inverse problem and avoid ill-posedness by assuming that the microscale can be accurately represented by a low-dimensional parametrization. The basis for our inversion will be a coupling of the parametrization to analytic homogenization or a coupling to efficient multiscale numerical methods when analytic homogenization is not available. We will analyze the reduced problem, $b = 0$, by proving uniqueness of the inverse in certain problem classes and by numerical examples and also include numerical model examples for medical imaging, $b > 0$, and exploration seismology, $b < 0$.