A time domain sampling method for inverse acoustic scattering problems

This work concerns the inverse scattering problems of imaging unknown/inaccessible scatterers by transient acoustic near-field measurements. Based on the analysis of the migration method, we propose efficient and effective sampling schemes for imaging small and extended scatterers from knowledge of time-dependent scattered data due to incident impulsive point sources. Though the inverse scattering problems are known to be nonlinear and ill-posed, the proposed imaging algorithms are totally “direct” involving only integral calculations on the measurement surface. Theoretical justifications are presented and numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our methods. In particular, the proposed static imaging functionals enhance the performance of the total focusing method (TFM) and the dynamic imaging functionals show analogous behavior to the time reversal inversion but without solving time-dependent wave equations.