Time-reversal acoustics and maximum-entropy imaging

Target location is a common problem in acoustical imaging using either passive or active data inversion. Time-reversal methods in acoustics have the important characteristic that they provide a means of determining the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the scattering operator for either of these problems. Each eigenfunction may often be approximately associated with an individual scatterer. The resulting decoupling of the scattered field from a collection of targets is a very useful aid to localizing the targets, and suggests a number of imaging and localization algorithms. Two of these are linear subspace methods and maximum-entropy imaging.