We investigate modified steepest descent methods coupled with a loping Kaczmarz strategy for obtaining stable solutions of nonlinear systems of ill-posed operator equations. We show that the proposed method is a convergent regularization method. Numerical tests are presented for a linear problem related to photoacoustic tomography and a non-linear problem related to the testing of semiconductor devices.

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We investigate level-set-type methods for solving ill-posed problems with discontinuous (piecewise constant) coefficients. The goal is to identify the level sets as well as the level values of an unknown parameter function on a model described by a nonlinear ill-posed operator equation. The PCLS approach is used here to parametrize the solution of a given operator equation in terms of a L 2 level-set function, i.e. the level-set function itself is assumed to be a piecewise constant function. Two distinct methods are proposed for computing stable solutions of the resulting ill-posed problem: the first is based on Tikhonov regularization, while the second is based on the augmented Lagrangian approach with total variation penalization. Classical regularization results (Engl H W et al 1996 Mathematics and its Applications (Dordrecht: Kluwer)) are derived for the Tikhonov method. On the other hand, for the augmented Lagrangian method, we succeed in proving the existence of (generalized) Lagrangian multipliers in the sense of (Rockafellar R T and Wets R J-B 1998 Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften (Berlin: Springer)). Numerical experiments are performed for a 2D inverse potential problem (Hettlich F and Rundell W 1996 Inverse Problems 12 251-66), demonstrating the capabilities of both methods for solving this ill-posed problem in a stable way (complicated inclusions are recovered without any a priori geometrical information on the unknown parameter).

In this paper, we propose a level set regularization approach combined with a split strategy for the simultaneous identification of piecewise constant diffusion and absorption coefficients from a finite set of optical tomography data (Neumann-to-Dirichlet data). This problem is a high nonlinear inverse problem combining together the exponential and mildly ill-posedness of diffusion and absorption coefficients, respectively. We prove that the parameter-to-measurement map satisfies sufficient conditions (continuity in the L 1 topology) to guarantee regularization properties of the proposed level set approach. On the other hand, numerical tests considering different configurations bring new ideas on how to propose a convergent split strategy for the simultaneous identification of the coefficients. The behavior and performance of the proposed numerical strategy is illustrated with some numerical examples.