Source Identification for Parabolic Equations from Integral Observations by the Finite Difference Splitting Method

Abstract

We study the problem of reconstructing an unknown source term in parabolic equations from integral observations. It is reformulated into a variational problem in combination with Tikhonov regularization and then a formula for the gradient of the objective functional to be minimized is computed via a solution of an adjoint problem. The variational problem is discretized by the splitting method based on finite difference schemes and solved by the conjugate gradient method. A numerical scheme for numerically estimating singular values of the solution operator in the inverse problem is suggested. Some numerical examples are presented to show the efficiency of the method.