A Multilevel Sampling Algorithm for Locating Inhomogeneous Media

In the reconstruction process of unknown multiple scattering objects in inverse medium scattering problems, the first important step is to effectively locate some approximate domains that contain all inhomogeneous media. Without such an effective step, one may have to take a computational domain of the size that is much larger than the actual sizes of all scattering objects, thus resulting in a huge additional computational effort. In this work we propose a simple and efficient multilevel reconstruction algorithm to help locate an accurate position and shape of each inhomogeneous medium. Then other existing effective but computationally more demanding reconstruction algorithms may be applied in these initially located computational domains to achieve more accurate locations and shapes of the scatterer and the contrast values over each medium domain. The new algorithm exhibits several strengths: robustness against noise, requiring less incidences, fast convergence, flexibility to deal with scatterers of special shapes, and advantages in computational complexity.