A moving pseudo‐boundary method of fundamental solutions for void detection

Abstract We propose a new moving pseudo‐boundary method of fundamental solutions (MFS) for the determination of the boundary of a void. This problem can be modeled as an inverse boundary value problem for harmonic functions. The algorithm for imaging the interior of the medium also makes use of radial polar parametrization of the unknown void shape in two dimensions. The center of this radial polar parametrization is considered to be unknown. We also include the contraction and dilation factors to be part of the unknowns in the resulting nonlinear least‐squares problem. This approach addresses the major problem of locating the pseudo‐boundary in the MFS in a natural way, because the inverse problem in question is nonlinear anyway. The feasibility of this new method is illustrated by several numerical examples. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2013