PIMS/UBC/IAM Distinguished Colloquium: Liliana Borcea

The talk is concerned with the application of sensor array imaging in complex environments. The goal of imaging is to estimate the support of remote sources or strong reflectors using time resolved measurements of waves at a collection of sensors (the array). This is a challenging problem when the imaging environment is complex, due to numerous small scale inhomogeneities and/or rough boundaries that scatter the waves. Mathematically we model such complexity (which is necessarily uncertain in applications) using random processes, and thus study imaging in random media. I will focus attention on the application of imaging in random waveguides, which exhibits all the challenges of imaging in random media. I will present a quantitative study of cumulative scattering effects in such waveguides and then explain how we can use such a study to design high fidelity imaging methods.