Finite element based inversion for time-harmonic electromagnetic problems

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SUMMARY In this paper we address the inverse problem and present some recent advances in numerical methods to recover the subsurface electrical conductivity from time-harmonic electromagnetic data. We rigorously formulate and discretize both the forward and the inverse problem in the finite element framework. To solve the forward problem, we derive a finite element discretization of the first-order system of Maxwell’s equations in terms of the electric field and the magnetic induction. We show that our approach is equivalent to the standard discretization of the vector Helmholtz equation in terms of the electric field and that the discretization of magnetic induction of the same approximation order is hidden in the standard discretization. We implement the forward solver on unstructured tetrahedral meshes using edge elements. Unstructured meshes are not only capable of representing complex geometry. They can also reduce the overall problem size and, thus, the size of the system of linear equations arising from the forward problem such that direct methods for its solution using a sparse matrix factorization become feasible. The inverse problem is formulated as a regularized output least squares problem. We considertworegularizationfunctions.First,wederiveasmoothnessregularizerusingaprimal-dual mixedfiniteelementformulationwhichgeneralizesthestandardLaplacianoperatorforapiecewiseconstantconductivitymodelonunstructuredmeshes.Secondly,wederiveatotalvariation regularizer for the same class of models. For the choice of the regularization parameter we revisit the so-called dynamic regularization and compare it to a standard regularization scheme with fixed regularization parameter. The optimization problem is solved by the Gauss–Newton method which can be efficiently implemented using sparse matrix–vector operations and exploiting the sparse matrix factorization of the forward problem system matrix. A synthetic data example from marine controlled source electromagnetics demonstrates the feasibility of our method and shows that both regularization functions and both regularization parameter selection schemes produce a comparable reconstruction of the subsurface conductivity.