The determination of the shape of an elastic obstacle immersed in water from some measurements of the scattered field is an important problem in many technologies such as sonar, geophysical exploration, and medical imaging. This inverse obstacle problem (IOP) is very difficult to solve, especially from a numerical viewpoint, because of its nonlinear and ill-posed character. Moreover, its investigation requires the understanding of the theory for the associated direct scattering problem (DP), and the mastery of the corresponding numerical solution methods. The work accomplished here pertains to the mathematical and numerical analysis of the elasto-acoustic DP and of the IOP. More specifically, we have developed an efficient numerical simulation code for wave propagation associated to this type of media, based on a DG-type method using higher-order finite elements and curved edges at the interface to better represent the fluid-structure interaction, and we apply it to the reconstruction of objects with the implementation of a regularized Newton method.
