Integrating the probe and singular sources methods: III. Mixed obstacle case

Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to develop further the integrated theory of the probe and singular sources methods (IPS) which may work for a group of inverse obstacle problems. Here as a representative and typical member of the group, an inverse obstacle problem governed by the Helmholtz equation with a fixed wave number in a bounded domain is considered. It is assumed that the solutions of the Helmholtz equation outside the set of unknown obstacles satisfy the homogeneous Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions on each surface of obstacles. This is the case when two extreme types of obstacles are embedded in a medium. By considering this case, not only a concise technique for IPS is introduced but also a general correspondence principle from IPS to the probe method is suggested. Besides, as a corollary it is shown that the probe method together with the singular sources method reformulated in terms of the probe method has the Side B under a smallness conditions on the wave number k , which is the blowing up property of a sequence computed from the associated Dirichlet-to-Neumann map.