This paper presents a numerical compression strategy for the boundary integral equation of acoustic scattering in two dimensions. These equations have oscillatory kernels that we represent in a basis of wave atoms, and compress by thresholding the small coefficients to zero. This phenomenon was perhaps first observed in 1993 by Bradie, Coifman, and Grossman, in the context of local Fourier bases BCG . Their results have since then been extended in various ways. The purpose of this paper is to bridge a theoretical gap and prove that a well-chosen fixed expansion, the nonstandard wave atom form, provides a compression of the acoustic single and double layer potentials with wave number @math as @math -by- @math matrices with @math nonnegligible entries, with a constant that depends on the relative @math accuracy @math in an acceptable way. The argument assumes smooth, separated, and not necessarily convex scatterers in two dimensions. The essential features of wave atoms that enable to write this result as a theorem is a sharp time-frequency localization that wavelet packets do not obey, and a parabolic scaling wavelength @math (essential diameter) @math . Numerical experiments support the estimate and show that this wave atom representation may be of interest for applications where the same scattering problem needs to be solved for many boundary conditions, for example, the computation of radar cross sections.
A class of algorithms is introduced for the rapid numerical application of a class of linear operators to arbitrary vectors. Previously published schemes of this type utilize detailed analytical information about the operators being applied and are specific to extremely narrow classes of matrices. In contrast, the methods presented here are based on the recently developed theory of wavelets and are applicable to all Calderon-Zygmund and pseudo-differential operators. The algorithms of this paper require order O(N) or O(N log N) operations to apply an N × N matrix to a vector (depending on the particular operator and the version of the algorithm being used), and our numerical experiments indicate that many previously intractable problems become manageable with the techniques presented here.