A multifrequency MUSIC algorithm for locating small inhomogeneities in inverse scattering

Abstract

We consider an inverse scattering problem for time-harmonic acoustic or electromagnetic waves. The goal is to localize several small penetrable objects embedded inside an otherwise homogeneous background medium from observations of far field patterns of scattered fields corresponding to plane wave incident fields with one fixed incident direction but several different frequencies. Taking advantage of the smallness of the scatterers with respect to wave length we utilize an asymptotic representation formula for the far field pattern to design and analyze a MUSIC-type reconstruction method for this setup. We establish lower bounds on the number of frequencies and receiver directions required to recover the number and the positions of the scatterers for a given configuration by the reconstruction algorithm. Furthermore we apply the method to the practically interesting case of multifrequency backscattering data. Numerical examples are presented to document the potentials and limitations of this approach.