Near-field imaging of scattering obstacles with the factorization method

Abstract

In this paper we establish a factorization method for recovering the location and shape of an acoustic bounded obstacle with using the near-field data, corresponding to infinitely many incident point sources. The obstacle is allowed to be an impenetrable scatterer of sound-soft, sound-hard or impedance type or a penetrable scatterer. An outgoing-to-incoming operator is constructed for facilitating the factorization of the near-field operator, which can be easily implemented numerically. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our inversion algorithm, including the case where limited aperture near-field data are available only.