Starting from zero, the Landweber iteration is
For , take the step size . Iterating the linear update gives
and its Landweber spectral filter in a singular system of a compact operator is
The strict upper step size bound makes for every positive singular value. A common more restrictive choice is , giving nonnegative damping factors. Each finite iterate is bounded and linear; early stopping of Landweber iteration controls the amplification of noise as smaller singular values are progressively inverted. If , every iterate is zero for any positive step size.
To first order in , replace by and use the known incident field in the outgoing integral. The Born approximation for scalar wave scattering gives
Both the contrast term and the internal-field correction are second order for fixed geometry in the perturbative regime established in part i.
Specify the data space before taking an adjoint operator. For example, let and , where is a bounded measurement surface separated from . Define the linear operator
For bounded incident field this is a Hilbert-Schmidt operator, hence a compact operator. The equation is , with . Other sampling geometries give corresponding data spaces and weights; the paper does not specify one. Using the usual complex inner products, its adjoint operator is
The complex conjugations are required by the adjoint operator identity, not by wave reciprocity alone.
The Landweber iteration starts from and applies gradient descent to :
Each step back-propagates the data residual. The Landweber relaxation parameter controls stability, and early stopping of Landweber iteration prevents small singular values from amplifying measurement errors. For an explicitly real-valued index contrast, use the real Hilbert space structure and replace by in this update. Additional sign or support constraints require corresponding projections; none are assumed here.
Use early stopping of Landweber iteration. For each finite , the Landweber spectral filter gives a bounded reconstruction operator; as , it approaches the generalized inverse on exact admissible data. Taking , a sufficient rule for a convergent regularization of an inverse problem is
or equivalently and . For example, satisfies both in the normalized problem. The first condition removes exact-data bias; the second prevents arbitrarily small measurement errors from being amplified by excessive iteration.
Regularization parameter 2026-10-05
A regularization parameter controls the tradeoff between approximation bias and data-noise amplification in an inverse problem. For early stopping of Landweber iteration with fixed step , the convention associates a smaller parameter with more iterations.