Numerical recovery of the piecewise constant leading coefficient of an elliptic equation

Abstract: We propose a numerical algorithm for the reconstruction of a piecewise constant leading coefficient of an elliptic problem. The inverse problem is reduced to a shape reconstruction problem. The proposed algorithm is based on the minimization of a cost functional where a control function is the right-hand side of an auxiliary elliptic equation for a level set representation of unknown shape. The numerical implementation is based on the finite element method and the open-source computing platform FEniCS. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated on computationally simulated data.