Abstract: This paper is concerned with estimation of electrical conductivity in Maxwell equations. The primary difficulty lies in the presence of numerous local minima in the objective functional. A wavelet multiscale method is introduced and applied to the inversion of Maxwell equations. The inverse problem is decomposed into multiple scales with wavelet transform, and hence the original problem is reformulated to a set of sub-inverse problems corresponding to different scales, which can be solved successively according to the size of scale from the shortest to the longest. The stable and fast regularized Gauss-Newton method is applied to each scale. Numerical results show that the proposed method is effective, especially in terms of wide convergence, computational efficiency and precision.

Key words: Maxwell equations, wavelet multiscale method, inversion, regularized Gauss-Newton method, finite difference time domain method