Determining the boundary of a two-dimensional region from the solution of the external initial boundary-value problem for the heat equation

Abstract

We determine the boundary of a two-dimensional region using the solution of the external initial boundary-value problem for the nonhomogeneous heat equation. The initial values for the boundary determination include the right-hand side of the equation and the solution of the initial boundary-value problem given for finitely many points outside the region. The inverse problem is reduced to solving a system of two integral equations nonlinear in the function defining the sought boundary. An iterative procedure is proposed for numerical solution of the problem involving linearization of integral equations. The efficiency of the proposed procedure is investigated by a computer experiment.