Solving inverse obstacle scattering problem with latent surface representations

Abstract We propose a novel iterative numerical method to solve the three-dimensional inverse obstacle scattering problem of recovering the shape of an obstacle from far-field measurements. To address the inherent ill-posed nature of the inverse problem, we advocate the use of a trained latent representation of surfaces as the generative prior. This prior enjoys excellent expressivity within the given class of shapes, and meanwhile, the latent dimensionality is low, which greatly facilitates the computation. Thus, the admissible manifold of surfaces is realistic and the resulting optimization problem is less ill-posed. We employ the shape derivative to evolve the latent surface representation, by minimizing the loss, and we provide a local convergence analysis of a gradient descent type algorithm to a stationary point of the loss. We present several numerical examples, including also backscattered and phaseless data, to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.