Inverse problems for linear hyperbolic equations using mixed formulations

Abstract

We introduce a direct method which allows the solving of numerically inverse problems for linear hyperbolic equations. We first consider the reconstruction of the full solution of the equation posed in —Ω being a bounded subset of —from a partial distributed observation. We employ a least-squares technique and minimize the L2-norm of the distance from the observation to any solution. Taking the hyperbolic equation as the main constraint of the problem, the optimality conditions are reduced to a mixed formulation involving both the state to reconstruct and a Lagrange multiplier. Under usual geometric optic conditions, we show the well-posedness of this mixed formulation (in particular the inf–sup condition) and then introduce a numerical approximation based on space-time finite element discretization. We prove the strong convergence of the approximation and then discuss several examples for N = 1 and N = 2. The problem of the reconstruction of both the state and the source terms is also addressed.