Weighted sparsity regularization for source identification for elliptic PDEs

This investigation is motivated by PDE-constrained optimization problems arising in connection with ECG and EEG recordings. Standard sparsity regularization does not necessarily produce adequate results for these applications because only boundary data/observations are available for the identification of the unknown source, which may be interior. We therefore study a weighted $\ell^1$-regularization technique for solving inverse problems when the forward operator has a significant null space. In particular, we prove that a sparse source, regardless of whether it is interior or located at the boundary, can be exactly recovered with this weighting procedure as the regularization parameter $\alpha$ tends to zero. Our analysis is supported by numerical experiments for cases with one and several local sources. The theory is developed in terms of Euclidean spaces, and our results can therefore be applied to many problems.