Imaging of buried obstacles in a two-layered medium with phaseless far-field data

Abstract

Abstract This paper is concerned with the inverse problem of reconstructing the location and shape of buried obstacles in the lower half-space of an unbounded two-layered medium in two dimensions from phaseless far-field data. Similarly to the homogenous background medium case, for this problem it is also true that the modulus of the far-field pattern is invariant under translations of the scattering obstacle if only one plane wave is used as the incident field, and thus it is impossible to determine the location of the obstacle from such phaseless far-field data. Based on the idea of using superpositions of two plane waves with different directions as the incident fields, a direct imaging algorithm is developed in this paper to locate the position of small anomalies with the intensity of the far-field pattern measured in the upper half-space. This is a nontrivial extension of our previous work (2018 Inverse Problems 34 104005) from the homogenous background medium case to the two-layered background medium case. Both the limited aperture measurement data and the presence of the two-layered background medium lead to difficulties in the theoretical analysis of the proposed imaging algorithm. To overcome the difficulties we employ the theory of oscillatory integrals. Further, with the aid of the imaging algorithm, a recursive Newton-type iteration algorithm in frequencies is proposed to reconstruct both the location and shape of extended obstacles. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the feasibility of our algorithms.