A multifrequency MUSIC algorithm for locating small inhomogeneities in inverse scattering

We consider an inverse scattering problem for time-harmonic acoustic or electromagnetic waves with sparse multifrequency far field data-sets. The goal is to localize several small penetrable objects embedded inside an otherwise homogeneous background medium from observations of far fields of scattered waves corresponding to incident plane waves with one fixed incident direction but several different frequencies. We assume that the far field is measured at a few observation directions only. Taking advantage of the smallness of the scatterers with respect to wavelength we utilize an asymptotic representation formula for the far field to design and analyze a MUSIC-type reconstruction method for this setup. We establish lower bounds on the number of frequencies and receiver directions that are required to recover the number and the positions of an ensemble of scatterers from the given measurements. Furthermore we briefly sketch a possible application of the reconstruction method to the practically relevant case of multifrequency backscattering data. Numerical examples are presented to document the potentials and limitations of this approach. (paper)