Recovery of an inclusion in photoacoustic imaging

In photoacoustic imaging the objective is to determine the optical properties of biological tissue from boundary measurement of the generated acoustic wave. Here, we propose a restriction to piecewise constant media parameters. Precisely we assume that the acoustic speed and the optical coefficients take two different constants inside and outside a star shaped inclusion. We show that the inclusion can be uniquely recovered from a single measurement corresponding to measurement of the pressure for one pair of unknown data at the boundary of the domain along the time interval. We also derive a stability estimate of Lipschitz type of the inversion. The proof of stability is based on an integral representation and a new observability inequality for the wave equation with piecewise constant speed that is of interest itself.