Suppose that a medium with slowly changing spatial properties is enclosed in a bounded 3-dimensional domain and is subjected to a scattering by plane waves of a fixed frequency. Let measurements of the wave scattering field induced by this medium be available in the region outside of this domain. We study how to extract the properties of the medium from the information contained in the measurements. We are concerned with the weak scattering case of the above inverse scattering problem (ISP), that is, the unknown. spatial variations of the medium are assumed to be close to a constant. Examples can be found in the studies of the wave propagation in oceans, in the atmosphere, and in some biological media. Since the problems are nonlinear, the methods for their linearization (the Born approximation) have been developed. However, such an approach often does not produce good results. In our method, the Born approximation is just the first iteration and further iterations improve the identification by an order of magnitude. The iterative sequence is defined in the framework of a Quasi-Newton method. Using the measurements of the scattering field from a carefully chosen set of directions we are able to recover (finitely many) Fourier coefficients of the sought parameters of the model. Numerical experiments for the scattering from coaxial circular cylinders as well as for simulated data are presented.
Cramér-Rao Bound Study of Multiple Scattering Effects in Target Separation Estimation