Recovery of an embedded obstacle and its surrounding medium from formally determined scattering data

We consider an inverse acoustic scattering problem in simultaneously recovering an embedded obstacle and its surrounding inhomogeneous medium from formally determined far-field data. It is shown that knowledge of the scattering amplitude with a fixed incident direction and all observation angles along with frequencies from an open interval can be used to uniquely identify the embedded obstacle, sound-soft or sound-hard, irrepective of the surrounding medium. Furthermore, if the surrounding inhomogeneous medium is from an admissible class (still general), then the medium can be recovered as well. Our argument is based on deriving certain integral identities involving the unknowns and then inverting them by certain harmonic analysis techniques. Finally, based on our theoretical study, a fast and robust sampling method is proposed to reconstruct the shape and location of the buried targets and the support of the surrounding inhomogeneities. © 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd.