Conductivity imaging from one interior measurement in the presence of perfectly conducting and insulating inclusions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the conductivity and the shape of certain inclusions inside a medium can be uniquely determined from a single interior measurement of current magnitude, even with perfectly conducting or insulating regions present.

Contribution

It extends the uniqueness results in conductivity imaging to cases with perfectly conducting and insulating inclusions, including the notion of admissibility and least gradient problems.

Findings

Unique determination of conductivity outside inclusions.

Shape and position of inclusions are uniquely identified.

Extension of admissibility and least gradient problem results.

Abstract

We consider the problem of recovering an isotropic conductivity outside some perfectly conducting or insulating inclusions from the interior measurement of the magnitude of one current density field $|J|$. We prove that the conductivity outside the inclusions, and the shape and position of the perfectly conducting and insulating inclusions are uniquely determined (except in an exceptional case) by the magnitude of the current generated by imposing a given boundary voltage. We have found an extension of the notion of admissibility to the case of possible presence of perfectly conducting and insulating inclusions. This also makes it possible to extend the results on uniqueness of the minimizers of the least gradient problem $F(u)=\int_{\Omega}a|\nabla u|$ with $u|_{\partial \Omega}=f$ to cases where $u$ has flat regions (is constant on open sets).