Simultaneously recovering both domain and varying density in inverse gravimetry by efficient level-set methods

Abstract

We develop new efficient algorithms for a class of inverse problems of gravimetry to recover an anomalous volume mass distribution (measure) in the sense that we design fast local level-set methods to simultaneously reconstruct both unknown domain and varying density of the anomalous measure from modulus of gravity force rather than from gravity force itself. The equivalent-source principle of gravitational potential forces us to consider only measures of the form \begin{document}$ \mu = f\,\chi_{D} $\end{document} , where \begin{document}$ f $\end{document} is a density function and \begin{document}$ D $\end{document} is a domain inside a closed set in \begin{document}$ \bf{R}^n $\end{document} . Accordingly, various constraints are imposed upon both the density function and the domain so that well-posedness theories can be developed for the corresponding inverse problems, such as the domain inverse problem, the density inverse problem, and the domain-density inverse problem. Starting from uniqueness theorems for the domain-density inverse problem, we derive a new gradient from the misfit functional to enforce the directional-independence constraint of the density function and we further introduce a new labeling function into the level-set method to enforce the geometrical constraint of the corresponding domain; consequently, we are able to recover simultaneously both unknown domain and varying density from given modulus of gravity force. Our fast level-set method is built upon localizing the level-set evolution around a narrow band near the zero level-set and upon accelerating numerical modeling by novel low-rank matrix multiplication. Numerical results demonstrate that uniqueness theorems are crucial for solving the inverse problem of gravimetry and will be impactful on gravity prospecting. To the best of our knowledge, our inversion algorithm is the first of such for the domain-density inverse problem since it is based upon the conditional well-posedness theory of the inverse problem.