Solving Inverse Wave Scattering with Deep Learning

Abstract: This paper proposes a neural network approach for solving two classical problems in the two-dimensional inverse wave scattering: far field pattern problem and seismic imaging. The mathematical problem of inverse wave scattering is to recover the scatterer field of a medium based on the boundary measurement of the scattered wave from the medium, which is high-dimensional and nonlinear. For the far field pattern problem under the circular experimental setup, a perturbative analysis shows that the forward map can be approximated by a vectorized convolution operator in the angular direction. Motivated by this and filtered back-projection, we propose an effective neural network architecture for the inverse map using the recently introduced BCR-Net along with the standard convolution layers. Analogously for the seismic imaging problem, we propose a similar neural network architecture under the rectangular domain setup with a depth-dependent background velocity. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed neural networks.