Alexander V. Mamonov

We study an inverse scattering problem for monostatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR): Estimate the wave speed in a heterogeneous, isotropic and nonmagnetic medium probed by waves emitted and measured by a moving antenna. The forward map, from the wave speed to the measurements, is derived from Maxwell's equations. It is a nonlinear map that accounts for multiple scattering and it is very oscillatory at high frequencies. This makes the standard, nonlinear least squares data fitting formulation of the inverse problem difficult to solve. We introduce an alternative, two-step approach: The first step computes the nonlinear map from the measurements to an approximation of the electric field inside the unknown medium aka, the internal wave. This is done for each antenna location in a non-iterative manner. The internal wave fits the data by construction, but it does not solve Maxwell's equations. The second step uses optimization to minimize the discrepancy between the internal wave and the solution of Maxwell's equations, for all antenna locations. The optimization is iterative. The first step defines an imaging function whose computational cost is comparable to that of standard SAR imaging, but it gives a better estimate of the support of targets. Further iterations improve the quantitative estimation of the wave speed. We assess the performance of the method with numerical simulations and compare the results with those of standard inversion.

In this paper we develop a numerical method for solving an inverse scattering problem of estimating the scattering potential in a Schrödinger equation from frequency domain measurements based on reduced order models (ROM). The ROM is a projection of the Schrödinger operator onto a subspace spanned by its solution snapshots at certain wavenumbers. Provided the measurements are performed at these wavenumbers, the ROM can be constructed in a data-driven manner from the measurements on a surface surrounding the scatterers. Once the ROM is computed, the scattering potential can be estimated using nonlinear optimization that minimizes the ROM misfit. Such an approach typically outperforms the conventional methods based on data misfit minimization. We develop two variants of ROM-based algorithms for inverse scattering and test them on a synthetic example in two spatial dimensions.

Waveform inversion seeks to estimate an inaccessible heterogeneous medium from data gathered by sensors that emit probing signals and measure the generated waves. It is an inverse problem for a second order wave equation or a first order hyperbolic system, with the sensor excitation modeled as a forcing term and the heterogeneous medium described by unknown, spatially variable coefficients. The traditional ``full waveform inversion" (FWI) formulation estimates the unknown coefficients via minimization of the nonlinear, least squares data fitting objective function. For typical band-limited and high frequency data, this objective function has spurious local minima near and far from the true coefficients. Thus, FWI implemented with gradient based optimization algorithms may fail, even for good initial guesses. Recently, it was shown that it is possible to obtain a better behaved objective function for wave speed estimation, using data driven reduced order models (ROMs) that capture the propagation of pressure waves, governed by the classic second order wave equation. Here we introduce ROMs for vectorial waves, satisfying a general first order hyperbolic system. They are defined via Galerkin projection on the space spanned by the wave snapshots, evaluated on a uniform time grid with appropriately chosen time step. Our ROMs are data driven: They are computed in an efficient and non-iterative manner, from the sensor measurements, without knowledge of the medium and the snapshots. The ROM computation applies to any linear waves in lossless and non-dispersive media. For the inverse problem we focus attention on acoustic waves in a medium with unknown variable wave speed and density. We show that these can be determined via minimization of an objective function that uses a ROM based approximation of the vectorial wave field inside the inaccessible medium.

Waveform inversion seeks to estimate an inaccessible heterogeneous medium from data gathered by sensors that emit probing signals and measure the generated waves. It is an inverse problem for a second order wave equation or a first order hyperbolic system, with the sensor excitation modeled as a forcing term and the heterogeneous medium described by unknown, spatially variable coefficients. The traditional “full waveform inversion” (FWI) formulation estimates the unknown coefficients via minimization of the nonlinear, least squares data fitting objective function. For typical band-limited and high frequency data, this objective function has spurious local minima near and far from the true coefficients. Thus, FWI implemented with gradient based optimization algorithms may fail, even for good initial guesses. Recently, it was shown that it is possible to obtain a better behaved objective function for wave speed estimation, using data driven reduced order models (ROMs) that capture the propagation of pressure waves, governed by the classic second order wave equation. Here we introduce ROMs for vectorial waves, satisfying a general first order hyperbolic system. They are defined via Galerkin projection on the space spanned by the wave snapshots, evaluated on a uniform time grid with appropriately chosen time step. Our ROMs are data driven: They are computed in an efficient and noniterative manner, from the sensor measurements, without knowledge of the medium and the snapshots. The ROM computation applies to any linear waves in lossless and nondispersive media. For the inverse problem we focus attention on acoustic waves in a medium with unknown variable wave speed and density. We show that these can be determined via minimization of an objective function that uses a ROM based approximation of the vectorial wave field inside the inaccessible medium. We assess the performance of our inversion approach with numerical simulations and compare the results to those given by FWI.

A space–time–parameters structure of parametric parabolic PDEs motivates the application of tensor methods to define reduced order models (ROMs). Within a tensor-based ROM framework, the matrix SVD—a traditional dimension reduction technique—yields to a low-rank tensor decomposition (LRTD). Such tensor extension of the Galerkin proper orthogonal decomposition ROMs (POD–ROMs) benefits both the practical efficiency of the ROM and its amenability for rigorous error analysis when applied to parametric PDEs. The paper addresses the error analysis of the Galerkin LRTD–ROM for an abstract linear parabolic problem that depends on multiple physical parameters. An error estimate for the LRTD–ROM solution is proved, which is uniform with respect to problem parameters and extends to parameter values not in a sampling/training set. The estimate is given in terms of discretization and sampling mesh properties and LRTD accuracy. The estimate depends on the local smoothness rather than on the Kolmogorov [Formula: see text]-widths of the parameterized manifold of solutions. Theoretical results are illustrated with several numerical experiments.

For a nonlinear dynamical system that depends on parameters, this paper introduces a novel tensorial reduced-order model (TROM). The reduced model is projection-based, and for systems with no parameters involved, it resembles proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) combined with the discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM). For parametric systems, TROM employs low-rank tensor approximations in place of truncated SVD, a key dimension-reduction technique in POD with DEIM. Three popular low-rank tensor compression formats are considered for this purpose: canonical polyadic, Tucker, and tensor train. The use of multilinear algebra tools allows the incorporation of information about the parameter dependence of the system into the reduced model and leads to a POD-DEIM type ROM that (i) is parameter-specific (localized) and predicts the system dynamics for out-of-training set (unseen) parameter values, (ii) mitigates the adverse effects of high parameter space dimension, (iii) has online computational costs that depend only on tensor compression ranks but not on the full-order model size, and (iv) achieves lower reduced space dimensions compared to the conventional POD-DEIM ROM. This paper explains the method, analyzes its prediction power, and assesses its performance for two specific parameter-dependent nonlinear dynamical systems.

Waveform inversion is concerned with estimating a heterogeneous medium, modeled by variable coefficients of wave equations, using sources that emit probing signals and receivers that record the generated waves. It is an old and intensively studied inverse problem with a wide range of applications, but the existing inversion methodologies are still far from satisfactory. The typical mathematical formulation is a nonlinear least squares data fit optimization and the difficulty stems from the nonconvexity of the objective function that displays numerous local minima at which local optimization approaches stagnate. This pathological behavior has at least three unavoidable causes: (1) The mapping from the unknown coefficients to the wave field is nonlinear and complicated. (2) The sources and receivers typically lie on a single side of the medium, so only backscattered waves are measured. (3) The probing signals are band limited and with high frequency content. There is a lot of activity in the computational science and engineering communities that seeks to mitigate the difficulty of estimating the medium by data fitting. In this paper we present a different point of view, based on reduced order models (ROMs) of two operators that control the wave propagation. The ROMs are called data driven because they are computed directly from the measurements, without any knowledge of the wave field inside the inaccessible medium. This computation is noniterative and uses standard numerical linear algebra methods. The resulting ROMs capture features of the physics of wave propagation in a complementary way and have surprisingly good approximation properties that facilitate waveform inversion.