Novel approaches to entropic regularization

In this work, two new entropic regularization techniques are introduced. Th ey represent a generalization of the standard MaxEnt regularization method, and allow for a greater flexibility for introducing any prior information about the expected structure of the true physical model, or its derivatives , into the inversion procedure. The first technique is based on the minimiz ation of the entropy of the vector of first-differences of unknown paramete rs. Adopting standard terminology, it is known as the minimum first-order e ntropy method (MinEnt-1). To illustrate the essential feature of the method , MinEnt-1 is applied to the reconstruction of two-dimensional geoelectric conductivity distributions from magnetotelluric data. The second technique is based on the maximization of the entropy of the vector of second-differe nces of the unknown parameters, and is denoted as the MaxEnt-2 method. The MaxEnt-2 method is applied to the retrieval of vertical profiles of tempera ture in the atmosphere from remote sensing data.