Direct time-domain soil profile reconstruction for one-dimensional semi-infinite domains

We discuss the inverse medium problem associated with the reconstruction of the heterogeneous material profile of a semi-infinite (layered) soil medium, directly in the time domain, based on the complete waveform response of the medium to interrogating waves. To tackle the inversion process, we use a partial-differential-equation-constrained optimization approach, supplemented with a time-dependent regularization scheme. We introduce an absorbing boundary to truncate the semi-infinite extent of the physical domain, and propose two schemes to refine the reconstructed profiles: the first is based on iteratively re-positioning the truncation boundary until convergence, and the second is based on optimizing the observation period, so as to exclude records with information beyond the truncation boundary. We present numerical results that attest to the efficacy of the proposed schemes in reconstructing sharp profiles of semi-infinite soil domains using both noise-free and noisy data, while in the presence of absorbing boundaries.