A direct linear inversion for discontinuous elastic parameters recovery from internal displacement information only

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present and analyze a new direct method for solving the linear elasticity inverse problem. Given measurements of some displacement fields inside a medium, we show that a stable reconstruction of elastic parameters is possible, even for discontinuous parameters and without boundary information. We provide a general approach based on the weak definition of the stiffness-to-force operator which conduces to see the problem as a linear system. We prove that in the case of shear modulus reconstruction, we have an $L^2$-stability with only one measurement under minimal smoothness assumptions. This stability result is obtained though the proof that the linear operator to invert has closed range. We then describe a direct discretization which provides stable reconstructions of both isotropic and anisotropic stiffness tensors.